Wrapped Up In Books
Have I mentioned recently that it's my birthday on Friday? Well, if you can't be self-absorbed on your weblog, where can you, I say. Today I got a present from my paternal grandparents. I suspect it's a book, although it's a little on the small side. Hopefully it's not a pocket-size New Testament or something (although I have been wishing recently that I had a Bible). My grandparents have on several occasions given me books which I have absolutely resisted reading, and I've managed to hold out for years on some occasions... and then when I eventually do read them, they become my favorite books. I'm thinking in particular of I Capture the Castle, which I wouldn't read and wouldn't read and oh my goodness what a spectacular book it turned out to be in the end. Do I learn from these experiences? Of course not. I still have a book on the shelf in Lillian's room that Grandma and Grandpa gave me maybe three years ago which I have never opened. It's probably amazing.
However, I am very much like Lillian in this respect, or rather, she is very much like me: neither of us will ever read a book we're told to read. Oh, we love reading, we consume books as though they were oxygen, but we're both terrifically lazy (sorry Lills) and don't like to read anything outside our normal realms. I've gotten better about this since coming to college, and I find it's helpful to turn it into one of my crazy rules: go to the library every fortnight and check out one Comfort/Fun read, one Required Reading, and one Wild Card. Left to our own devices, Lillian and I would just read the same couple of books ad infinitum long past the time when we'd memorized every word.
Let me try to make a list of the books I've read lately, in backwards chronological order:
- Moab is My Washpot (unfinished)
- Three Scientists and Their Gods (unfinished)
- Beyond the Limits of Thought (unfinished)
- The Liar
- Everything is Illuminated
- Middlesex (for the second time)
Okay, well, I expect I'll be finishing Moab around Friday, and I hereby solemnly swear that if the little package from my grandparents is a book, I will have an earnest go at it. Unless it is, in fact, the Bible. Well, okay, even then.
4 Comments:
My experience is similar, although part of my problem is slotting a new read into the que. Often I'm on a particular kick-- or resistant to a particular sort of read. For the past several years, for example, I've read very little new fiction.
I hope it's not a bible.
I just hada brilliant idea..."How Do I Look" meets "The New York Review of Books!" Every show can have three people go through a friend's bookshelves and pick something to chide them about, probably, in the way of these things, something that is a guilty pleasure read. Then the three "accomplices" go book shopping and come back with their suggested reading lists. You heard it here first!
I never wanted the book I was given and usually found it was the better book than the one I thought I did want, but I've gotten over that, mostly. I'm also a serial reader in that when I find something I like very much and discover it is one of a series or intended series, I become quite intent on following the designated order, which has caused me problems, such as a series of 7 novels tracing the history of American settlement of which I have only 3 because I wouldn't buy 6 when I hadn't found 4 yet or the other series of 7 novels tracing the history of North American settlement of which I have only 3 because the damn author hasn't finished the series and writes them out of order anyway. Or the series of ten police novels of which my brother has my copy of the fifth or seventh, I forget which, that spoils the whole collection because I can't possibly have it in a different edition, can I? (And let's not talk about the fact that there are at least thirty or more volumes of Doc Savage stories I'll never have - which shouldn't matter, since they're all exactly the same except for the one where he fights the Devil.) But if you do get a bible: Numbers isn't about math, just arithmetic; Leviticus is boring but will help you understand the kosher laws, although that will require the Talmud, really; Psalms are pretty is small doses; Proverbs are preachy; the major prophets are more fun than the minor ones, usually, Jonah being a particular exception; and Revelations is the most fun out of the New Testament.
happy birthday pretty girl
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