Page Mileage

 

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!