Hopper's Second-Half Summer Reading

 

Well, the dust has settled here in Dallas. The wife is working, I am looking for work, the girls are preparing for their school year, which begins, almost sacrilegiously, in the middle of August. The house is basically unpacked. There are some loose ends to be tied up, minor repairs to be made, and some final tasks related to the move. Hopefully I’ll be working soon enough. I already have a possible interview set up, and am looking to pick up my new used car in a couple of days.

Now, more importantly, I must address my reading plan, now that I have time.

Oh, and I also have a writing plan, but I’ll get to that in another post.

For now, reading.

Here is my tentative list for the second half of summer 2021:

 

1. The Witnesses, excerpts from the Warren Commission

2. Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

3. World War II at Sea by Craig L. Symonds

4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

5. The Man Who Killed Kennedy by Roger Stone

6. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet

 

Whew. That’s nonfiction – fiction – nonfiction – fiction – etc. And it’s 3.429 pages. Hopper, as usual, always chooses the modest route. Let’s see … there’s 38 days until Labor Day, so to put these away by summer’s end would require a par of 90 pages a day.

Honestly, that’s not doable, even unemployed. I couldn’t live with myself reading that much and not bringing in any coin to the family coffers. So I’ll hold myself to 40 daily pages. About an hour a day. At that rate, I’ll finish the six-book list by October 24, just in time to start something spooky for Halloween, a tradition I’ve held myself to for nearly twenty years.

Why these books?

Well, in part, these were the cream of the crop of my On Deck Circle when we moved. I donated a couple hundred books to the VA, including a lot of the stuff I’ve never read. But I kept these because, well, they interested me.

The Witnesses and The Man Who Killed Kennedy because now I’m living a half-hour from Ground Zero of the Kennedy Assassination. I was big into this a decade ago and haven’t been so much since reading Posner’s book which persuaded me (to the tune of about 95%) of the Lone Gunman theory. But I still get a thrill, a detective-like fascination, with anything and everything to do with those terrible events of the weekend of November 22 to 24 in 1963.

Little Big Man because, I suppose, I’m now in the south, in the heat, and just a stone’s throw beyond the new developments and shopping malls there is indeed prairie and mountains and cactus and star-filled night skies, and I fancy what I’d be like had I lived a century-and-a-half ago. I fear this book might be a little snarky and almost downright anti-Western, which is probably why I haven’t read it yet (I bought it in 2012), but as it’s the only Western I currently own, I put it on the list.

Frankenstein because it’s an old-school epic and I bought it in mind with reading simultaneously with Patch, much like we did The Count of Monte Cristo in 2019. But, alas, she’s not in the proper frame of mind for a deep dive into early 19th-century epistolary writing. I skim-read the book sophomore year of high school in the early 80s, so I’m looking forward to a thoughtful re-read. My gut tells me the whole dangers-of-man-playing-God thing is quite relevant in today’s society.

World War II at Sea was a recommendation I noted back during my walks last summer when I’d listen to WW2 lectures. Seems to be the be-all and end-all of the top-down view of naval warfare 1937-1945, at least from what I’ve heard. And I’ve always wanted to read Follett’s Pillars for many, many years. It’s an epic I think should fit nicely into the early fall down here.

Read on, amigos!