Zen and the Art of Choosing a Book

All right, so I really have no reading plan for 2014, which is quite a departure from my fairly regulated 2013. I figure this year I’ll just read what I feel like, when I feel like it. Nothing planned out in advance. No grand strategies. Just moment-by-moment stuff. Very Zen-like, this focusing on the here-and-now.

So, last Saturday I went into my local library with no idea what I’d select to read. Well, that’s not a hundred percent true. I decided I would go to sections I rarely, if ever, frequented. And it sorta worked. For at least one book, that is.

That book is Atlantic by Simon Winchester, a “history” or “biography” of the Atlantic Ocean. Now, I’m not really a nautical kind of guy. I read Jaws a hundred years ago and Moby Dick around the turn of the century. I was fascinated with Donald Crowhurst and the round-the-world solo yacht race for a couple of weeks a few years ago. That’s about it, unless you toss in Robert Silverberg’s excellent kid-SF Conquerors from the Darkness.

Needless to say, based solely on skimming through the book, I’m excited to read it. Don’t know if I’ll finish it, or get beyond the first chapter, but it definitely looks interesting.

My other scores are more me, though not necessarily the types of books I’ve recently read. Buzz Aldrin’s Mission to Mars; a book detailing the heartbreaking Challenger disaster, No Downlink; and a book on the whole UFO thing that examines our American mythology from a unique, for me, point of view: manufactured paranoia. Looks interesting, all of them. I will get to each in its turn over the next couple of weeks.

My six-foot-high stack of books in the basement still cry out to me, too. I sorta randomly selected two for upcoming reads, again depending on which strikes my fancy at whatever time. One is a bio of Lovecraft by Lin Carter (selected subconsciously, I think, after all my chats about horror with Little One). The other is Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, chosen really only for it’s “feel” in my hands.

That is all. Commence reading, Zen warriors.