2025 Reading Plan

 

 

Over the holidays we had a pipe break in the wall between the master bedroom and the storage space beneath the stairs going up to the second floor of our home.

 

This decided my Reading Plan for 2025.

 

I originally thought I’d read my way through the Great Books collection I inherited a two decades ago. I tried Herodotus, and failed. I tried Plutarch, and failed. I started getting worried. I pulled out Augustine, Cervantes, even Boswell, and was repelled by each in turn like similar poles of a magnet.

 

What was going on?

 

I’ve learned over the years that a book comes to you when the time is right. Kinda like that saying that the teacher appears when the student is ready. Books are teachers, of that I have no doubt, and I guess I’m not ready for the intellectual rigor and focus required to get though these Great Books. Or rather, I have other pressing duties and obligations first to fulfill before I sit down before a roaring fire and journey with Herodotus through the ancient world, or tilt at windmills with Don Quixote.

 

So what does all this have to do with a burst pipe?

 

Well, we had to remove some boxes from the storage room so the plumber could get in, cut out part of the wall, and do his plumbing magic to the fractured pipe (it actually was a slow leak, more like a drip that must’ve been dripping for several weeks). Two of the boxes contained books packed during our move from New Jersey nearly four years ago. A lot of those books were from my On Deck piles. Most, if not all, I haven’t read. Those books, predominantly history and physics/math fiction and nonfiction, had instantly become my 2025 Reading Plan.

 

I’m starting off with two Civil War books that the Mrs. had bought me for my birthday back in 2020. There are also some WW2 doorstops, four WW2 novels, and a book on the Crusades. Since I like to juggle two books at a time, I’m also working my way through a book on particle physics. There are two others I found on quantum mechanics, and – wow! – a Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy omnibus! All four books of the Hitchhiker trilogy in one hardcover! I read these books in the summer of 1989 with a buddy, and what a fun read that was. Truly. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy could be the funniest book(s) I ever read.

 

I decided to be laid back after a somewhat rigid 2024 of reading (such as Tom Clancy books in story chronological order, or Dean Koontz books in the order I read them as a kid). Now, once I finish a book, history or science, I’ll see what one jumps in my hand next. Could be a switch to fiction. Dunno. Whatever I’m ready for, well, that will be what I read next. But I do want to get to the Hitchhikers books in the spring, when it starts getting a little warmer out.

 

I did order three paperbacks on, of all things, the history of Buddhism, thanks to some deep dives into meditation and mindfulness I’ve done recently. They were, however, erroneously delivered to my daughter’s mailbox at college. So when she comes back home next, in two or three weeks, I’ll toss those books onto the “Storage Room Box” pile and get to them, too, before spring.

 

Happy laid-back reading, all!

 

N.B. For those who think I always have my nose in a book, I read about an hour a day. I do not watch TV regularly, save for some hockey games here and there, a weekly movie with Patch and a weekly SF movie over the weekend while the ladies are out, and maybe a show here and there with the Mrs. So I basically read during the time most of my family and friends are watching TV.