summer reading
Because I have so much time, and I want to stay away from computers, I've decided to spend my time reading some books. Usually, I don't do that. Now, I'm learning to ride the frigate that will take me lands away.
Aside from reading The Ancestors' Tales by Richard Dawkins on evolution, The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, all of which cover current events and are non-fiction, my fiction reading list is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst.
I don't know why, but I never really was attracted to reading fiction. Yes, I did read Harry Potter Series, and the Dan Brown novels featuring Robert Langdon. But, for Harry Potter, I actually read the first few pages before getting bored. It was only the media buzz due to the book topping the Bestseller List that made me re-read the books again.
As for Angels and Demons, I was conflicted about buying the book, but I happened to be in a bookstore near the Castro, the gay district. As part of my feeble anti-corporation acts, I bought the book there to support the bookstore rather than going to Amazon.com, to Borders, or Barnes and Noble. So I had to read Angels and Demons, since I plunked down some money on it. Of course, Angels and Demons, as you know, was an exhilarating book that I am glad to have read before The Da Vinci Code.
I did read many books when I was young. The only problem was it wasn't interesting. At the very least, it wasn't memorable enough for me to recall a single detail. In fact, in fourth grade, for assigned readings where I had to read a book for 20 minutes, I switched between four different books during the week. Obviously, I can't juggle different plotlines while I was 9, but I pretended that I could.
Now, I'm trying to really read books the way people are supposed to read them. I suppose that's a fallacy, it's based on the premise that there is a majority of people in the world who are normal and who spend their idle hours reading books, when I must take into consideration that literacy was an education afforded to so few and so recently that it hasn't yet been engrained in our genome.
Why do I want to read, yet procrastinate in it? I believe many people share that sentiment. We want to read Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, but we simply don't have the time or leisure in this frenetic age when all sorts of media clamor for our attention. The book has not settled in its place to be our favored medium over the interweb, so easy to use that few people need to know what the URL is or stands for.
Aside from reading The Ancestors' Tales by Richard Dawkins on evolution, The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, all of which cover current events and are non-fiction, my fiction reading list is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst.
I don't know why, but I never really was attracted to reading fiction. Yes, I did read Harry Potter Series, and the Dan Brown novels featuring Robert Langdon. But, for Harry Potter, I actually read the first few pages before getting bored. It was only the media buzz due to the book topping the Bestseller List that made me re-read the books again.
As for Angels and Demons, I was conflicted about buying the book, but I happened to be in a bookstore near the Castro, the gay district. As part of my feeble anti-corporation acts, I bought the book there to support the bookstore rather than going to Amazon.com, to Borders, or Barnes and Noble. So I had to read Angels and Demons, since I plunked down some money on it. Of course, Angels and Demons, as you know, was an exhilarating book that I am glad to have read before The Da Vinci Code.
I did read many books when I was young. The only problem was it wasn't interesting. At the very least, it wasn't memorable enough for me to recall a single detail. In fact, in fourth grade, for assigned readings where I had to read a book for 20 minutes, I switched between four different books during the week. Obviously, I can't juggle different plotlines while I was 9, but I pretended that I could.
Now, I'm trying to really read books the way people are supposed to read them. I suppose that's a fallacy, it's based on the premise that there is a majority of people in the world who are normal and who spend their idle hours reading books, when I must take into consideration that literacy was an education afforded to so few and so recently that it hasn't yet been engrained in our genome.
Why do I want to read, yet procrastinate in it? I believe many people share that sentiment. We want to read Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, but we simply don't have the time or leisure in this frenetic age when all sorts of media clamor for our attention. The book has not settled in its place to be our favored medium over the interweb, so easy to use that few people need to know what the URL is or stands for.
Labels: books
posted by Alan at June 14, 2006
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