For the past dozen or more years, reading has been my
primary hobby. It’s my main form of relaxation, escapism, mental stimulation.
To experience different times, to live vicariously through characters sometimes
alike and sometimes quite dissimilar from myself, to be physically moved by an
exercise of the mind – this and more is the pleasure of what reading does for
me.
What have I read these past six, seven months of radio
silence? Well, quite a lot, apparently, reflecting upon this.
I revisited many old friends – Tom Clancy with The Bear
and the Dragon, Richard Adams with one of perhaps a dozen definitive books
of my youth, Watership Down, and the Arthurian world in The Once and
Future King.
The latter two promoted a journey, or perhaps
continued one, into the classics. I notched another bucket list item in Crime
and Punishment. More Arthuriana with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (this
on behest of collegian Little One). East of Eden, The Bridge of San
Luis Rey, Wuthering Heights – wrestled with each, for better or
worse, though usually for the better.
I renewed acquaintance with Shakespeare, too. Per my
high schooler, Patch, I re-read and re-lived Romeo and Juliet, something
I hadn’t touched or thought of since sophomore year of high school in the early
80s. And in the same vein, under a similar whim, I borrowed two lesser known
plays and read though them outdoors in the sweltering Texas heat: Titus Andronicus
and Pericles. Suffice it to say that I now know why they are labeled
“lesser-known.”
Mid-summer, all alone with the wife at sales
conferences and the little ones in Pennsylvania with their grandparents, my
reading took curved off to the weird. I found two old classic books on Nostradamus
and read both his prophecies and an exacting and overly exhaustive biography
of the publication of his works. Speculation on the quatrains I left for later
this winter. And I hung out with my old pal, PKD, and read The
Transmigration of Timothy Archer, a brilliantly written but somewhat punch-lacking
70s novel of, well, soul transmigration, I guess.
For Halloween, I found an old classic a high school
friend lent me as a senior in mid-1985: Floating Dragon by Peter Straub.
That novel hit me with a barrowful of nostalgia. Some scenes gross and horrible
as I remembered, others a little off and not as creepy or disgusting as the old
RAM between the ears recalled. This I chased with H.G. Wells’ War of the
Worlds, found in Patch’s backpack. I remember purchasing this nearly half-a-century
ago from the Bookmobile. I read it in a few days and was surprised at how much
of it Spielberg put into the 2005 film version (or, rather, how bold Wells was
to include such horrifying aspects of the Martian total war technique – and what
they did to innocents fleeing them on foot).
The only real disappointment was another novel I re-read based on fond youthful memories. Wolfen, by Whitley Strieber, a late-70s
novel about urban werewolves. I loved it as a kid, having to read it stealthily
(it was on a relative’s shelf and probably was a little too mature for me at
the age I read it). It brought some nostalgia, but cynical, mature me found too
much to criticize and that cut into the enjoyment.
Anyway, I have an epic to finish my year’s end, which
will be a subject of a later post.
Happy reading, all!
