Possible Future Change of Direction

I’m finishing up the phenomenally excellent and exceptional Civil War history A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton (and will pick up anything else written by him that I come across) and expect to hit WW2 in a few days.  I posted my reading plan a few days ago.  Over the past two years I’ve been reading a lot on the great global conflict, in addition to watching History and Military Channel documentaries and TCM movies concerning the subject.  So much so that now hot summer weather and warm summer nights seem interwoven with the Allied fight against the Germans and the Japanese, the suffering and heroism of millions over the span of a half-dozen years, the great good and evil personalities that molded our planet’s history those seven decades ago.

Anyway, that reading should take me up to September, Labor Day or even my birthday, when the days are still bright and the leaves are still tree-bound but a wonderful cool crispness overtakes the air.

The perennial Hopper question: What to read, what to read …

I assume I’ll be all warred out.  I find the subject endlessly fascinating but one that quickly wears on my spirit.

So most likely I’ll be looking for a change of pace.  Something different.  New and exciting.  Something 180 degrees from Civil Wars and World Wars, or, better still, completely perpendicular to it.

What to read, what to read …

I’m burnt out on science and math.  My towers of SF paperbacks stacked about, mute and silent.  No interest in alternate religions or philosophies.

Then, an idea hit me last night as I was dozing off to sleep.

Poetry!

The germ must have been planted in my subconscious earlier in the week.  Watching a boring ballgame, the girls in bed and the wife still out and about in the Big Apple, I thumbed through an anthology of Tennyson, my favorite poet.  Turned midway through to his Idylls of the King, one of my favorite “epic” poems.  Read about a half-dozen tiny-typed pages and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  (The Mets lost by the way.)

In addition to the old Tennyson compendium, I have dusty tomes holding the works of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Longfellow, and Whitman.  All but the Whitman are older than me.  Most I found at library book sales, treasuries of Western Civilization bought for a buck or two.  All have at least five or six hundred pages and most contain the entire poet’s oeuvre. 

Why not pick one this September and read it through, front to back, slowly, thoughtfully, meditatively, instead of skimming through and re-reading only the ten percent or so of each that I’m familiar with?

Why not?

I’ll think about it.  I could do the Tennyson, ’cuz he’s my fave, or I could start with Byron and work my way up chronologically.  Or I could pick one at random, say, have Patch pick one out for me.

I dunno.  Have to give it some thought.

But a lot can happen in the next four months …