Re-reading Multiple Re-reads

  

So after reflecting on the previous post over the weekend, I realized I left out a very major book, one that has played an important and essential role in my life.

 

I studied this book in high school for two years, though I never read it cover to cover. That had to wait until 1992.

 

Then, during the scary first weeks of the Wu Flu in 2020, I re-read it again in its entirety, though not in sequential order of its parts.

 

In between I read various sections of it literally dozens of times.

 

I’ve read books about this book.

 

I’ve listened to people lecture about this book.

 

I’ve bought at least six or seven different copies of this book.

 

Care to guess what this book is?

 

Yep. The Bible.

 

I received my first Bible, technically the New Testament, a pocket-version, when I received my first Holy Communion while still in the single digits. I still have that Bible, though its spine is cracked and the pages yellowed with age. I attended a top Catholic High School in the ’80s, and during freshman year we went through the Old Testament, reading selections, memorizing important verses, bullet points, biographies, lists, and chronologies, and did the same thing with the New Testament sophomore year.

 

Then, hedonism interrupted and dominated my life for seven years, and the only time I picked up a Bible was when me and a friend were doing something with my Tascam 4-track recorder and we wanted that verse about “legion”, probably to insert with distorted vocals backwards over some dopey riffs. When I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, I quit all my vices, read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and had a spiritual awakening.

 

That was with the simplistic TEV (Today’s English Version) Bible. I still have a soft spot for it, especially all those line drawings. But I moved on to different versions in my re-reads: the King James, the Douay-Rheims, a Protestant “Men’s Devotional”, an Anselm study Bible, and the Revised Catholic Edition. Theology aside, my favorite has to be the King James (and I know that that, too, is “protestant”). Simply and absolutely love the poetic majesty, the archaic grandeur, all those “ye”s, “thy”s, “thine”s and “thou”s.

 

Now aside from my two complete readings of the Bible in its entirety in 1992 and 2020 and a complete reading of the New Testament later, I’ve read many, many books of the Bible many, many times. Unfortunately, I haven’t really kept track until recently. But my best estimated guess is that the books of the Bible I’ve read and re-read the most are:

 

   Genesis – 7 times

   Exodus – 4 times

   Proverbs – 3 times

   Psalms – 3 times

   Revelation – 3 times

   The Gospels – at least 3 times each but probably not more than 7 times.

 

Why have I read Genesis the most? Simple. Every couple of years I get the itch to re-read the Bible in its entirety, and more often than not, I make it past this first book and not much further.

 

Now, a clarifying word. I write this not to brag or “humblebrag” (though probably there’s a bit of that here, to be honest). I’d like you to read the Bible, too. Many times. It’s never too early and it’s never too late. Read it, ruminate on it, think upon it, come to it with an open mind, a questioning-in-faith mind, a hopeful mind. It will speak to you. Somehow, in some way, often unexpected and often delayed, it does. I wholeheartedly encourage you to pick it up.

 

But here’s the tricky part. There are so many translations, you have to pick one that resonates with you. Not all of us like those thous and thines. I do. You may not. You may enjoy the TEV version (and my derogatory term “simplistic” should not deter anyone from it; the TEV was the version that led to my reversion). Test drive a couple of versions before you pick one to stick with. You could visit the local library to borrow different translations (I did), buy from inexpensive used book stores (I did), or go online to sample different translations (I did). Biblegateway.com is a great resource.

 

And start small. I would not advise a Genesis-to-Revelation approach unless – and it’s a big unless – unless you are into reading grand visions and scopes of epic proportion. It is a marathon and not a sprint. But I enjoy sweeping epics and being immersed in different literary cultures (hence my love of Tolkien and other fantasy and science fiction trilogies and such). I found that when starting with Genesis, the whole thing gradually and then quickly built up, like an avalanche, rolled forward with more power and might – to the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. I felt that sense of purpose unfold in the chronologic words of the Bible.

 

But if you want to start small, to “test the waters,” start with the Gospels, then move on to the shorter Pauline letters. As for the order of Gospels, Mark is the shortest, Matthew and Luke and about the same length (but Matthew is aimed toward a Jewish audience whereas Luke is aimed towards the gentiles). John is shorter than both, but heavy with theology. Save Revelation for much later. Then hit the Old Testament. Genesis, Exodus up to the Ten Commandments. Then the Psalms. Then get a sense of history and read Joshua, the Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles. Isaiah should be in there once you get your footing. Let the Spirit lead you on from that.

Please heed my advice. And if you do – happy reading!!

Multiple Re-reads

 

Thinking about how I’m currently traversing my third go-round with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, I began musing on how many other multiple re-reads I’d done.

 

First off, it’s good to re-read a good book; it’s an excellent idea to re-read an excellent book. The better the book, the more profitable a re-read should be. For the longest time, say, from about 2000 to 2020, I had little interest in re-reading books, save for childhood faves. Instead I cast as far and wide a net as possible, especially the years when I fancied myself an up-and-coming slash potential author. Occasionally I would do deep dives into certain authors’ bibliographies. But since the Wu Flu, I’ve kinda grown disgusted and dissatisfied with a lot of stuff out there. Most of the stuff out there. So much so that if it’s a nonfiction topic I’m exploring and it’s at all possible, I choose something before 1980. Something before 1965’s even better. Less chance the material is infected by certain mind viruses. This feeling applies equally to the fiction that I’ve tentatively considered of late.

 

That’s one reason why re-reads are a great idea. Another is the nostalgia factor – what were you doing, feeling, being when you first encountered the particular book. What was going on peripherally in your life. Yet another is the technical knowledge you’d reinforce if we’re talking nonfiction, and the degree you’d assimilate literary technique if it’s fiction in front of you. Yet another factor, similar, is that books meet you where you are. You change, and the book changes to meet you. Wonderful books I’ve read as a kid failed to leave an impression on me as an adult; some books that were meh to me as a young man floored me in my middle ago; and vice versa. Still another reason is that you always – always – see something new and exciting in later re-reads. Something fresh and different always jumps out at you. Like revisiting a classic film periodically throughout the years.

 

Why would you only see Paris, the Grand Canyon, or the Alaskan glaciers once and only once if you had the means and opportunity? Do we not speak to our friends on a regular basis? Even better for long-lost ones, to re-connect? If we enjoy skiing, biking, playing tennis, chess, you name it, we never just do it once and say, “Well, that was fun. Never again. I’ll just savor the memory.” Just so with re-reading.

 

All right, enough of that. That’s where my headspace is at the moment. I wholeheartedly encourage you to re-read the great books you have read earlier in your life. Trust me, it’s worth it.

 

What have I re-read multiple times?

 

I’m such a reading nerd that I have been tracking all the books I’ve read over the course of my life. Currently, give or take a dozen or so forgotten in the fog of age, I’ve read just shy of 1,300 books over just shy of 50 years.

 

92 of those books I’ve read more than once. That’s only 7 percent.

 

Of those re-reads, care to guess which one book I’ve read the most?

 

Easy. Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the trilogy five times (last time being 2021). But technically, the book I’ve read the most is The Fellowship of the Ring, at six times, since I revisited it in the summer of 1994 but did not proceed to the other books in The Lord of the Rings (band, college, and a girlfriend all conspired to make it difficult to continue).

 

Two books I’ve read four times each:

   The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells (once as a kid in the 70s, then again in the 90s, in 2015 as an audiobook, and finally for Halloween 2023).

   The Life of Christ, by Bishop Fulton Sheen (once in the late 90s, and then three times [!] in 2015)

 

Nine books I’ve read three times each:

   The Hobbit, by Tolkien

   Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

   Watership Down, by Richard Adams

   and then five science fiction paperbacks –

      Red Planet, by Robert Heinlein

      To Die in Italbar, by Roger Zelazny

      The Grayspace Beast, by Gordon Eklund

      The Colors of Space, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

      The Spinner, by Doris Piserchia

      Red Tide, by D. D. Chapman and Deloris Lehman Tarzan

 

The remaining 80 or so read only twice are too numerous to list, but I will note the ones that I could see another future re-read, pushing them into the vaunted and respected “Threepeat” category:

 

   The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

   The Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien

   The Inferno, by Dante

   Watch the Skies!, by Curtis Peebles

   A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

   Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

   Conquerors from the Darkness, by Robert Silverberg

   Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

   In Dubious Battle, by John Steinbeck

 

Not sure what my next re-read will be, but I have an omnibus edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams behind me as I write this; that seems to be probably the finest candidate at the moment (it would be a second re-read, my first encounter with them being the late 80s).

Vacation 2025

 

Spent last week visiting family and friends in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the first time I’ve been up there in exactly two years. We have the girls fly up once or twice annually to visit their grandparents, cousins, and old school friends, but I haven’t been to the great northeast wilderness (yes, there is plenty of wilderness up there) in a long time and I missed it.

 

It was whirlwind week. We hit an extreme amount of turbulence flying up into New Jersey / New York airspace (of the type when the 747 drops a stomach-churning fifty feet than banks sharply to one side, to be repeated at unexpected intervals) but landed safely in LaGuardia on Monday. We picked up our reserved rental car and made it up to my folks’ by eight that night.

 

Over the next four days we did a lot, thanks to mild weather. Tuesday saw us hitting the thrift shop with the girls (I picked up four golf shirts suitable for work plus a beautiful edition of Moby Dick – Moby Dick! – with a cover price of $21 – for 89 cents[!], the greatest bargain of my book-hunting career). Wednesday my brother and aunt and uncle drove up for a barbecue and we played pickleball all day. On Thursday we visited a college for Patch and then hit the local wing joint for dinner. Friday we drove into New Jersey and visited our old friends (my movie-going buddy from back in the day) while the girls socialized with one of theirs. Saturday we lounged in the morning and left at noon for the drive back to LaGuardia and the flight home. Sunday was a recovery day which included a lot of laundry being done.

 

The only downside was all that driving. 700 miles, I estimate, over the course of five days. Ugh. My buttocks are still petrified.

 

Needless to say, I was quite whelmed at work, having to do nine days of accounting in four days, including closing the month, and responding to 87 emails. Most nights I came home shell-shocked and spent the evenings with Ishmael on the Pequod. Today, Friday, I am quite caught up and working from home, hence this short update. Only one more big report to get done, then I’m off the clock.

 

Anyways, I think I’m going to start reading Augustine’s Confessions followed by his City of God this weekend. I’m about halfway through Moby Dick, my third visit with America’s greatest novel. Truly it encapsulates more than, in the words of Ron Swanson, the story of a man who hates a fish. There’s natural history, existentialism, a deep dive into human consciousness and motivation, intense drama and glorious, flowering mid-nineteenth-century prose, the chronological highwater mark of English literature that only few can delve nowadays. I’m enjoying it immensely, so much so that I might check out another 1850-ish novel by an American, The House of Seven Gables, once I’m finished. But Augustine is calling me now, so perhaps I’ll read that in the evenings and Melville at lunch.

 

Little One is in town today; she has two local summer job interviews this afternoon. My firstborn is growing so fast it’s almost frightening. The Mrs. will drive her back to school Saturday, grab her roommates, and they’ll all go “tulip picking,” or something of the sort. Patch is reffing Saturday morning (as long as the fields are dry; it rained all last night and this morning) and then later heading out to Six Flags with her friends. So I’ll be alone tomorrow afternoon. Probably get some wings or perhaps a Hawaiian pizza if I’m feeling wild and watch a classic flick.

 

Well, I got four emails while writing this, so back to work I go.

 

Happy reading!

 

Haunted 70s

 

Is there an English word for fun and terror? A word that contains elements of both, yet transcends the pair? Something like the German schadenfreude, I guess, though funterror (pronounced with the accent on the last syllable, i.e., fun-ter-ROR!) doesn’t seem to pack the same punch as what it’s meant to convey.

 

I write this because a few days ago I was comparing childhoods with my not-so-little Little Ones, trying to convince them that my childhood had this degree of funterror (fun-ter-ROR!) that I hoped I was able to institute into their lives. Now, I realize this sounds downright, well, insane, but, trust me, for a kid when the fun in funterror slightly outweighs the terror, then it’s completely a thousand times worth it.

 

But I don’t think the degree of funterror I experienced in the late-70s as a tween compares to what our kids experience nowadays. Haven’t really thought deep about it, but I think social media has something to do with it. Removing the fun, that is, and jacking up the terror. Closely followed by the Internet, where with a few clicks in a few minutes any exciting and fascinating unexplained mysterious phenomenon can be swiped away of all fascination.

 

These musings prompted me to write up a list of all the terrifying fun I had from 1977 to 1980. I called it “Haunted 70s”, and here is an edited list:

 

The creepy woods behind my house …

The rumor at school of that chopped up body found in a cardboard box behind the woods in my house …

Snippets from the news: Love Canal, 

Three Mile Island, Jonestown …

The death of John Lennon and first hearing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” …

The “lonely tree” in the neighbor’s yard, leafless in the fall moonlight, right outside my bedroom window …

UFOs everywhere …

Sasquatch everywhere …

Will Skylab fall on me or my house? …

Building models of monsters … Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the wolfman …

Movies: The Blob, The Fly, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Legend of Boggy Creek …

Certain Star Trek episodes – the Horta, Landru, 

the flying pizzas …

The 001.94 section of the library where my mother worked …

The Hammer horror films shown on the ABC 4:30 movie after school …

Chariots of the Gods and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow …

The Son of Sam killings in the news …

The Salem’s Lot miniseries watched right before we slept alone in the basement …

The Jesus Tree at Fordham University …

The Night Stalker watched late at night on our little black-and-white TV …

In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy, especially the bigfoot and flying saucer episodes …

The episode of the original Superman where the little bald aliens look in the open window of the boy’s window (a personal nightmare for single-digit me) …

 

There, those’re just the ones I feel comfortable posting semi-anonymously. One day I hope my not-so-little ones will come up with lists of their own. And we can all share together outside at night around a roaring campfire …

π Day!

 

Although I haven’t posted about it on the blog since 2020, π Day is celebrated every March 14 here at the Hopper household with unbridled gusto! Champagne, party hats, a few roman candles, plus dancing until the wee hours of the morning! Since we’ve entered Lent, and it’s a meatless Friday, we’re skipping the filet mignon and charcuterie board.

 

Now, with the assistance of AI, I offer you the Weirdest Fact About π –

 

The sequence 123456 will not be found in the first million digits of π. And π has been calculated out to over 62.8 trillion digits, so we’ll have to wait a bit before the location of that sequence is found.

 

And a bonus fact –

 

 A sequence of six nines (999999) can be found in π at the 762nd position in the digit expansion. This block of nines is known as the Feynman point, after physicist Richard Feynman (whose biography I read earlier this year), joked that he could recite all the digits of π up to this point.

 

Finally, about 17.3 billion digits in, you can spot the sequence 0123456789. (Is this the first appearance of 123456? Let me get a pencil and check …)

 

And really finally, there’s a website out there that will find the location of your birthday in the digit expansion of π. Haven’t checked it out yet, but it’s some fun to save for the weekend.

 

Happy π Day!

 

Music 2025

 

 

This is a new development.

 

So far 2025 has not struck me in any particular literary way. Nothing has really jumped out at me, nor have any themes leapt up and seized me by the lapels demanding attention. No new subjects have overrun my mental Maginot line. No paradigm shifts or reading revolutions. No nostalgia bait hooking me like a spring-loaded cat as I shuffle about candle in hand down the dark, damp, cobwebby corridors of memory. Nothing.

 

Except …

 

Music.

 

2025 has been the year of music for me, so far, these past ten weeks.

 

It all started at Christmas. The Mrs had bought me Geddy Lee’s autobiography, My Effin’ Life. Who is Geddy Lee? Only one of the greatest bassists ever, also known as the vocalist for the band Rush. Rush was one of the first bands I listened to at that very vulnerable age, right after the Golden Age of Science Fiction (when a lad turns eleven and before he turns thirteen). To this day I still remember the first song of theirs I heard – “Tom Sawyer,” to no surprise (it was 1981 and the song had only been out a year). However, I had heard it on my brother’s Walkman, and the way the sounds entered my brain, panning between ears, the new sounds of distorted guitars, keyboards, and an army of drums, ignited a passionate curiosity that still lasts to this day.

 

I put My Effin’ Life into immediate rotation and wrote of it here a few weeks’ back.

 

As I have written about many, many times in the Hopper, Rush was one of my top three bands, especially when I was stumbling out into forming bands, writing songs, playing live, and recording, at home, in a friend’s garage, or in the studio. I did this off and on from about 1986-96, to no great success but plenty of fun. My long-time bass player and drummer, both good pals, were also Rush fans. And when my singer and lead guitarist were not present, we’d run through a good dozen Rush songs to warm up. It was a blast.

 

But I was only exposed to 70s Rush. Their first eponymous album debuted in 1974, and the last album I really listened to, Signals, came out in 1981. For most of the 80s they adopted an 80s sound, which didn’t interest me. In the 90s they adopted a 90s sound, again which didn’t interest me because by that time I was listening to first grunge and then, around 1998, I switched completely to classical music for the following five years.

 

I tell all this to let you know that I made it a little side quest to listen to Rush’s 19 studio albums in chronological order. (The band technically ended in 2015 when drummer Neil Peart retired from touring; Peart later died in 2020.) So I basically exposed myself to ten albums of new music, about nine hours of 90 new songs. Nice!

 

Now, I’m still not a fan of 80s Rush, but, man, did I enjoy most of 90s (and 2000s) Rush. With some help from Patch I made two playlists for my phone – “Rush 80s” and “Rush Minus 5”. I have been listening to this almost exclusively during my walks and a little bit each day as I do my accounting chores for work.

 

“Rush 80s” is 17 songs, 1 hour 29 minutes, of the best to my liking of those four 80s albums.

 

“Rush Minus 5” is a playlist of every song on the last five albums from the band:

   Counterparts (1993)

   Test for Echo (1996)

   Vapor Trails (2002)

   Snakes & Arrows (2007)

   Clockwork Angels (2012)

Each of these five albums is loaded with A and B+ songs. Each usually has a pair of A+ songs. Only one song of all these five albums was not added. This playlist has 59 songs for 4 hours and 59 minutes of music. It is great to play through my Bluetooth speaker while lifting.

 

Then, last month, the Mrs and I went to see the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin in the theaters. Now, I know it’s essentially a hagiography, but, man, what an outstanding hagiography. I had goosebumps and a lump in my throat listening and watching for those two hours. In anticipation, I had bought a biography of the band, When Giants Walked the Earth, and had read that over the ten days following. This is the first time I did an in-depth deep dive into one of my favorite all-time bands next to Rush. It’s the first written material I’d read on the band and Jimmy Page since reading The Hammer of the Gods forty years ago. Yeah, the long passages of drug excess, groupies, and the occult grew tiresome, but the backstories of the members and the songs and the recording techniques and technical aspects of the tours fascinated me this time around.

 

And on a side note, all this Rush and Led Zeppelin, part-nostalgic and part-new, has not crowded out my quarter-decade interest in classical music. In addition to my Beethoven symphony score I wrote about last month, I also picked up a record of Copland’s greatest works and another of Bach’s organ music, particularly the Toccata and Fugue in Dm.

 

So 2025 is really a musical year for me, something I haven’t truly experienced since 1998 or 1999.

 

Happy listening!
 

N.B. I also pulled my electric guitar out of storage and have been playing and practicing for an hour each Sunday over the past five weeks …