May Mid-Month

 

What a hectic month it’s been!

 

Summer is here already in northeast Texas. Temps already hovering in the 90s. The days are lengthening, with darkness creeping up around 8:45 every night. My grass is growing with a vengeance after an extremely wet pseudo-spring. So I’ve been mowing every weekend, along with weeding, mulching, and hedge-clipping.

 

But it’s more than the outdoor chores that keep me busy. The wife had a short trip to Austin earlier this week, making me Dog Lord and Mr. Mom. I’ve been navigating a stressed-out Patch with her AP finals the past ten days. Little One comes and goes (and I’m the chauffeur), staying with us earlier in the month to interview and obtain a job at a day-care/summer camp place in town, and a few days ago moving out of her dorm with my help. We’ve been rooting for the Stars in the Stanley Cup playoffs and all the stress that entails. They’re the equivalent of the Eli-era Giants or the ’15-’16 Mets, alternately brilliant and abominable, and you never know which team’ll show up. Work gives me little reprieve, especially with the overload of traffic, traffic lights, and construction getting to it. About the only oasis of sanity in my life this month has been that cold NA beer in the shade before a freshly mown backyard. Oh, and reading.

 

I’m a creature of habit, and my lifelong hobby of immersive reading is no exception. Lately I decided to install a new habit – that of reading through the Gospels after every Easter. I did so a few weeks back, and am in the process of re-reading them a second time. With dedication you could knock out Mark in an evening, or the longer Matthew, Luke, or John in two or three days. Me, leisurely reading about a half-hour a night, found it takes two weeks to read through all four.

  

I also scratched off a bucket list item, The Confessions by St. Augustine. I found myself enjoying his incessant questioning (a trait I find in myself) and his spiritual awakening during the first half of the book, but found his philosophical musings in the latter half – on Spirit, time, form, creation – interesting but not riveting. I have come to the realization that I am not, at this stage of my life, interested in philosophy. Or perhaps other things are now more important to me than the love of wisdom, for I have found it – rather, it has been under my nose the whole time. Regardless, as I get older, my patience for non-productive activities is sharply declining.

 

But back to books. I think I have the rest of the year plotted out. Care to indulge me? OK!

 

I have finally returned to Tolkien. My plan is to read through his works within his story chronology. Starting with The Silmarillion (I’m already 30 pages in), then moving to The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, then my battered copy of Unfinished Tales. With J.E.A. Tyler’s Complete Tolkien Companion at my side. The time is right, and I am right there. This should yield a fun, nostalgic summer for me. By my rough calculations, this will take me up to Labor Day.

 

September will bring, again, another turn for nostalgia. In the summer of 1989 me and a buddy read through Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is possibly the funniest four-book trilogy I’ve ever read. I mean, laugh out loud funny. Have not touched it since. I picked up a single-volume omnibus an untold time ago (it might predate my children). It should be a quick read, and I should gulp down the whole thing in a month. This should make September a happy month, as it should be, being the month of my birthday and those of Little One and Patch.

 

For my October/Halloween “horror” reading I am going to (re)turn to Stephen King. Yes, he has morphed into a loathsome and cringy troll with his leftist politics, much like DeNiro. However, just as I can (barely) watch a DeNiro movie with the man’s clueless second-hand embarrassment not affecting the performance (the Mrs. and I watched Heat a few weeks ago), I am hoping to re-read King’s magnum opus It with the same bit of authorial dissociation. It was one of my favorite reads as a teen/twentysomething, when I was in my horror phase. I read it last in 1987, and, like The Lord of the Rings, it holds a lot of nostalgia for me. I remember where I was during various portions of the novel. I have not read any King in over twenty years, so I am testing to see if I can still enjoy his writing, specifically It on a second reading. I think it might be a blogworthy topic.

 

My Thanksgiving reading will return to Dickens. About a dozen years ago I listened to about an hour of The Pickwick Papers during my commutes back and from work. I soon realized that the serialized novel required the printed page to be fully enjoyed, and put it on the Acquisitions List. Well, last weekend I found an aged, absolutely beautiful hardbound volume in my local library, and this thousand-page tome called and cried out to me. This is what I will read in November and the early part of December.

 

Finally, I have a neat SF paperback from the fantastic Robert Silverberg, of whom I recently blogged about. It’s called Roma Eterna, and is an alternate-history pastiche of novellas that falls under the most classic of alternate-history scenarios: what if the Roman Empire never fell? The cover boasts a scenic view of a Roman city-scape, stone and marbled columns and arches and all, with a rocket ship launching off in the distance. I was instantly hooked.

 

Well, that’s what’s up with middle-aged Hopper. Negotiating the stresses of life with his simple enjoyments of the printed page. Along with the grooved record and the electrified guitar, the walked path, the lifted weight, the – oh, enough of this. Enjoy!