Raymond Chandler is perfect for that kind of reading, too. Some of his descriptions are so gorgeous I still luxuriate in them, although the books were given away years ago. I read all of his stuff in college, because our Esteemed Leader gave me a copy of the "The High Window" simply because it had a delightfully lurid, '40s retro-style cover.
Thank you for either copy-pasting or hand-typing that exquisite selection. I've not read Anna Karenina once, but I've read Lucky Jim twice (and Neuromancer four times, God help me). There's another scene in which Jim views the contents of an attic, in which he sees an archery target. There's a reference to the "flaring imbecilities it had witnessed." I'll dip into that, and Wodehouse, and Martin Amis's Money. All Brits!
I think a couple of neurons may have crossed their wires: the narrator of ATKM is *Jack* Burden (as I well know, having recently reread it for about the tenth time since 1968).
Doris Lessing's kind of like that for me. Or some of her stuff is. The Golden Notebook. I don't care I don't care la la la don't tell me any criticism ... I devoured it. Read it maybe 9 times in a row. Summer Before Dark, also a balm to me. No one I know talks about Pearl S. Buck but I loved a couple of her books esp the Good Earth. In high school nobody was reading her. It nourished me. I read Adrian McKinty's books all out of sequence. The Irish books. He's now got major bestsellers (set in'Merica) and good for him. He's bloody well earned it. But the Sean Duffy series and the Dead series are stellar gems. That can be read out of sequence and it won't hurt a bit.
I don’t "graze" novels I have never read before, because how the hell could you follow the plot, LOL? But I do read a lot of nonfiction, usually historical biographies or books on sociology/politics, and I dip in and out of those. Most recently I’m reading Myth America, edited by the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, and I am sampling the various essays. With biographies, I’m usually most interested in a certain period in the subject’s life and will read that bit first, then work backwards and forwards.
And then there is the fiction I return to for comfort. For me that includes a variety of authors, from Ian Rankin mysteries to the Jeeves and Wooster stories, to anything by Jane Austen – really, I have so many “comfort books” I couldn’t list them all. I’ll read anything from a few pages to a few chapters, then put them aside again until next time.
I don't graze new books either, but like you, I have comfort re-reading. I also turn to Jane Austen. Others include any Beverly Cleary book involving Ramona Quimby, "The Witches Of Karres" by James Schmitz, "The Group" by Mary McCarthy and "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis. Also a lot of Mary Roach. Oh, and another nonfiction book: "The Ends Of The Earth" by Peter Brannen. Oh wait, I also revisit animal books by Temple Grandin. I'm gonna stop myself now....
I think it's one of the greatest historical novels I've ever read, at least partly because it's about human connection. There's a (possibly fictional) historian mentioned in the book who claims that our ancestors didn't really have the same kinds of emotions we do -- and for me, anyway, the whole book is about proving him wrong.
My comfort re-read seems to be Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition", because it seems to be about so much about the U.S. and, I must admit with a little shame, because it validates pretty much all of my prejudices, including that there were little very new under the sun. (…e.g., especially, the thriving medicinal alcohol business in the 1920s.)
"I have tended to throw off much ballast" also, mostly because downsize again & again. Also and counter to your thought that no one else will read 'em so why not keep 'em, I assume someone will stumble on the old books about the rise and the continued success of fascism and therein find something worthwhile and (more to be hoped) infuriating.
Come'on in – the shallow end is crowded, but there's always room for one more...
Should add here that after giving away so many books over time I still have a small stash that I could not bring myself to part with. Ambrose Bierce. Walt Kelly. A big-ass historical atlas. Some wildlife & botany reference books. An old Whitman I found under a house we were shoring up. Shakespeare sonnets (an edition my grandfather's father had that is so old it's wrapped in a bag to keep it all in one place). And a few books gifted from the authors. All of these I still wade (not dive) into on occasion.
My hat tips to all those who read, reread, and re-re-re...the folks who pull those texts straight into their bones are marvels to me. And I include the scholars who get paid to do that – the recompense is as near as I see only the gravy...
Books are the one thing it's socially acceptable to hoard (excepting money, of course.) Why is it that a wall of books marks you as a sophisticate, but piles of newspapers stacked about the room makes you some kind of nut?
I haven’t “grazed” books, but it sounds like fun. My approach to reading books and listening to music has been to read from beginning to end, and listen from the first track to the last in order. Maybe there was a linear coherence of themes or narrative in the order of the songs or movements, maybe not. But dammit, that’s how yer SPOSED to enjoy it.
Grazing sounds liberating from this attitude. It also may increase my actual reading by piquing my interest in a book that otherwise I would skip, daunted by the number of pages or arcane subject matter. I’m going to give it a try.
Well, good, I guess. But I never thought of it as a conscious approach -- just something I fell into and wondered if it wasn't universal. Maybe more people of consciousness would peg it for ADD.
Yeah, my first response to this was 'YER DOIN' IT WRONG" because I'm such a linear thinker and reader. I've got books that are intended to be leafed through at random (one beautiful volume on heirloom tomatoes, for example, that someone gave me) and they mostly just sit unread. Where's the sense of accomplishment that comes from reading cover to cover, huh?
Why not both--read it all the way through, return to graze later? Catch-22 is one of my read-through and grazing books. I'll open one of my copies to some random page and read through to the end of a chapter.
Silmarillion.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf
Pig Boats
The History of US Destroyers in WWII
And especially lately, Garmin avionics installation manuals.
Feb 24, 2023·edited Feb 24, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
From the time I was 10 years old until I was old enough to get a driver's license I spent every Saturday afternoon at the big downtown library in the county seat . My Mom would come to town to get groceries and whatever and drop me off the library on the way. Real quickly, though not so quick that anyone would notice, I migrated from the children's room to the main part of the library where I just knew they kept the good stuff.
I found it too! By the time I was 13 , I could skim your typical 380 page best seller for the hot parts, have them all found and read in about 20 minutes. So yeah, everything I know about sex I learned from Jackie Collins . Hey, could have been Mickey Spillane or Harold Robbins
The library had a great selection of books about film. . I know now that the collection was wide and deep. By the time I was 15 I bet I read a thousand books about film- including most of the key works. Now these were books about films that I was mostly never able to see. By the time I was a driving teenager I started to figure out places I could actually see some of these films that I've been reading about. Yellow Springs had the little art Theater in the day would pretty dependably show
some foreign classics. You usually didn't have to be a class member to sit in on some of the film shown at the film classes in the local universities. The first time I saw a Rules of the Game was it the Ohio State University about a 60 mile drive. I told my parents I was going to go play basketball and headed over to Columbus to see the film. While I was in the theater freezing rain had started and I put the car in the ditch three times on the way home. Twice people pulled over and pushed me out. The third time I drove half a mile through the ditch waiting for a place that I could pull the car back up on the road. I didn't get back till after midnight. I figured I was in big trouble - I was going to at least lose my car privileges. Nobody noticed I was gone. Charles Champlin had a series on PBS, Film Odyssey , which showed me just about everything I needed to see - that really changed my life.
This is a good topic I wish I had more time. I'm anxious to read everybody else's stories.
Anyway I have two bookcases at home one is full of horticulture textbooks, guides, manuals. I'm lucky. The books associated with my profession are the kind of books that you would read just because the pictures are beautiful and the information is interesting. I mean, no one's ever going to sit down and browse the physics textbook for fun.
The other bookcase is mostly full of film books, a lot of which I was exposed to at the library 57 years ago. I still own a copy of" The Films of Orson Welles" by Charles Higham
that I somehow got from the Wright State University Library.
I don't remember stealing it but I probably did. I think what happened is I meant to keep it over the summer break and never went back to school there. Probably go to hell for that- and deserve it!
The weather is improving. Tuesday it rained and that turned into snow. I didn't much notice as I had a $2.5 million proposal due by 5 PM Tuesday. Wednesday they called off school as it got very cold and we had like a foot of snow so it was very slick, too. Thursday school started late and I think the high was -7 F. Today it is approaching +10 F, and it is supposed to get to about 40 tomorrow and 50 on Sunday
After you get familiar enough with the arc of the magnificently overstuffed "Moby-Dick," you can read a chapter here and there with thoughtful satisfaction. It helps me pay better attention to the craft of it, and besides, l always love his jokes (especially the naughty ones).
I keep Huck Finn around just for the last sentence. I pick up Blood Meridian at least once a year and open it to whatever. I believe I've read the first 3 chapters of Magnificent Ambersons 30 times.
Many times, but now closing in on 70 life is short. Besides, I’ve forgotten just about all of them. These days I need a package undone and then wrapped back up with strapping tape and twine to get me to the end of the week….or month(s).
My parents had a bound volume of New Yorker cartoons from the '20s through the '50s or so, and that was my main grazing material (along with others). Everything I learned about the Depression, WWII and early-to-mid-century culture in general I learned there. Heady stuff for a little girl in Columbus, Ohio.
Lately one of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood has been carrying National Geographics, late 60's to early 70's, and it's the perfect thing for when you wake up at 3am and can't get back to sleep. A couple of nights ago I read a bit about Chelsea, in London, which was quite the Mod place to be in early 1972, although quickly gentrifying, it's poorer tenants being evicted by Lord Cadogan, who owned 90 acres in downtown London.
I also picked up a copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, although I can't imagine I'll ever get through it, short as it is. But just in the first few pages I learned that early 19th century druggists in Manchester would have the opium pills lined up on the counter on a Saturday ready to go, for the factory workers when they got off work. Factory work paid so little the workers couldn't afford beer, opium was cheaper.
Great book about Opium is Steven Martin’s “Opium Fiend.” Guy got interested in collecting Opium smoking paraphernalia which it turns out has a very interesting history.
Definitely do this with poetry anthologies. I do not tend to do this with fiction at all. But I do comfort rereads all the time. For me it’s the narrative that I enjoy, and coming upon the special bits is an extra pleasure.
The Year of the Quiet Sun, by Wilson Tucker, IMHO the greatest time-travel novel ever written. It's fairly episodic, so once you know the full story, you can read the sections out of order. Top of the list for me is The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, but I'm not sure it counts in this context.
I have to confess that I don't read novels and such in bits, though with books I've had in my life for decades like The Andromeda Strain there are passages I remember from when I was young and didn't understand some of the plot, like the James Bond films I went back to later in life and realized there's a lot I ignored tying together the action scenes.
But I do have a class of books I call "flip-through" books, large format books of mostly pictures I peruse when I can not brain enough to deal with plots. An example is the book of early auto ads Dad had in the 80s and which I picked up a copy of several years back.
Where I'm bad about buying and not using is RPGs - The Collection I mostly have never actually PLAYED, but which I love to study and think about. There's something comfortable about those 1st Edition AD&D books I keep going back to, particularly the Monster Manual with its classic art and bare-bones descriptions.
I am similar. Back when I used to play frequently, getting my group to try a new system was tough. Some of us were up for a game of Paranoia or other different ones but a couple of the guys only really wanted to play D&D
Feb 24, 2023·edited Feb 24, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Oh, I am a constant reader: and constant rereader: and having run a bookstore gave me access to stuff I'd never imagined..
When the ex died, she had boxes and boxes of books she'd got at yard sales for her hoard: and a few were treasures: and I recycled a bunch into the bookstore's Used shelf. There were easily 5000 books.
I winnowed that down to something I thought reasonable and we had maybe 400 books and lost those in the fire...I never finished "A Manuscript Found in Saragossa", and maybe one of the three different translations of "Tale of Gengi" (always fun to compare)...
Among the books I replaced were one I dip into for exactly comfort reasons: R. Christiansen's "Paris Babylon", his rambling anecdotal take on the French Second Empire, Paris as it's center of culture, and how those who lived through it and the Siege of Paris/Commune saw it. It's rich, and immensely interesting to me. Recommended, if only for the people he quotes..
I re read Tolkein less now, but there were times it was a comfort, though now it's increasingly less interesting (the poetry is crap)...but I have LOTR and the Silmarillion.
Not quite the same thing: remember M. Twain's summation of the Book of Mormon? "Laudanum in print?" Having been sort of forced into Bible study as a kids, the Oxford Companion to the Bible (80s edition) is the book I read to put me to sleep. The scholarship is sound, and shows just how much evangelical Bible thumping is crap: Pick an article and I'm usually out in 15-20 minutes.
After the home burned, Terry Pratchett was a great comfort: the early Diskworld novels are pretty weak, and intended as send ups of Sword and Sorcery fantasy novels (Cohen the Barbarian, anyone?): but the later ones become social satire and commentary in medieval motley.
I would disagree about the early TP books being weak, they aren't as good as most of the later ones, but really only The Color of Money and The Light Fantastic were send ups of swords and sorcery, and even those had a satirical look at Western attitudes about tourists from the East. Also, TP did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser before Cohen
Well, they might be different but Equal Rites, Mort, Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids are not Sword and Sorcery books. Mort is generally considered one of the best books in the whole series
Yes F & GM were Fritz Leiber. They were at the end of the first short story in Colour of Magic as Bravd and the Weasel
Raymond Chandler is perfect for that kind of reading, too. Some of his descriptions are so gorgeous I still luxuriate in them, although the books were given away years ago. I read all of his stuff in college, because our Esteemed Leader gave me a copy of the "The High Window" simply because it had a delightfully lurid, '40s retro-style cover.
Hard agree. Chandler's descriptions are great.
Thank you for either copy-pasting or hand-typing that exquisite selection. I've not read Anna Karenina once, but I've read Lucky Jim twice (and Neuromancer four times, God help me). There's another scene in which Jim views the contents of an attic, in which he sees an archery target. There's a reference to the "flaring imbecilities it had witnessed." I'll dip into that, and Wodehouse, and Martin Amis's Money. All Brits!
Heroic. Thank you.
That Kingsley Amis passage is the greatest hangover scene in all of English literature, perhaps in the entire Western canon.
I think a couple of neurons may have crossed their wires: the narrator of ATKM is *Jack* Burden (as I well know, having recently reread it for about the tenth time since 1968).
Doris Lessing's kind of like that for me. Or some of her stuff is. The Golden Notebook. I don't care I don't care la la la don't tell me any criticism ... I devoured it. Read it maybe 9 times in a row. Summer Before Dark, also a balm to me. No one I know talks about Pearl S. Buck but I loved a couple of her books esp the Good Earth. In high school nobody was reading her. It nourished me. I read Adrian McKinty's books all out of sequence. The Irish books. He's now got major bestsellers (set in'Merica) and good for him. He's bloody well earned it. But the Sean Duffy series and the Dead series are stellar gems. That can be read out of sequence and it won't hurt a bit.
I don’t "graze" novels I have never read before, because how the hell could you follow the plot, LOL? But I do read a lot of nonfiction, usually historical biographies or books on sociology/politics, and I dip in and out of those. Most recently I’m reading Myth America, edited by the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, and I am sampling the various essays. With biographies, I’m usually most interested in a certain period in the subject’s life and will read that bit first, then work backwards and forwards.
And then there is the fiction I return to for comfort. For me that includes a variety of authors, from Ian Rankin mysteries to the Jeeves and Wooster stories, to anything by Jane Austen – really, I have so many “comfort books” I couldn’t list them all. I’ll read anything from a few pages to a few chapters, then put them aside again until next time.
I don't graze new books either, but like you, I have comfort re-reading. I also turn to Jane Austen. Others include any Beverly Cleary book involving Ramona Quimby, "The Witches Of Karres" by James Schmitz, "The Group" by Mary McCarthy and "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis. Also a lot of Mary Roach. Oh, and another nonfiction book: "The Ends Of The Earth" by Peter Brannen. Oh wait, I also revisit animal books by Temple Grandin. I'm gonna stop myself now....
Temple Grandin is awesome!
The Witches of Karres and Doomsday Book are among my favorites too!
Your figurative mileage varies greatly from mine: I read "The Doomsday Book" decades back and am _still_ uncomfortable thereby.
I think it's one of the greatest historical novels I've ever read, at least partly because it's about human connection. There's a (possibly fictional) historian mentioned in the book who claims that our ancestors didn't really have the same kinds of emotions we do -- and for me, anyway, the whole book is about proving him wrong.
My comfort re-read seems to be Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition", because it seems to be about so much about the U.S. and, I must admit with a little shame, because it validates pretty much all of my prejudices, including that there were little very new under the sun. (…e.g., especially, the thriving medicinal alcohol business in the 1920s.)
"I have tended to throw off much ballast" also, mostly because downsize again & again. Also and counter to your thought that no one else will read 'em so why not keep 'em, I assume someone will stumble on the old books about the rise and the continued success of fascism and therein find something worthwhile and (more to be hoped) infuriating.
Come'on in – the shallow end is crowded, but there's always room for one more...
Should add here that after giving away so many books over time I still have a small stash that I could not bring myself to part with. Ambrose Bierce. Walt Kelly. A big-ass historical atlas. Some wildlife & botany reference books. An old Whitman I found under a house we were shoring up. Shakespeare sonnets (an edition my grandfather's father had that is so old it's wrapped in a bag to keep it all in one place). And a few books gifted from the authors. All of these I still wade (not dive) into on occasion.
My hat tips to all those who read, reread, and re-re-re...the folks who pull those texts straight into their bones are marvels to me. And I include the scholars who get paid to do that – the recompense is as near as I see only the gravy...
Books are the one thing it's socially acceptable to hoard (excepting money, of course.) Why is it that a wall of books marks you as a sophisticate, but piles of newspapers stacked about the room makes you some kind of nut?
Their relative flammability and potential as rodent nesting grounds?
I've done a couple newsprint-reduction interventions that probly extended (not saved – everybody dies) people's lives.
I haven’t “grazed” books, but it sounds like fun. My approach to reading books and listening to music has been to read from beginning to end, and listen from the first track to the last in order. Maybe there was a linear coherence of themes or narrative in the order of the songs or movements, maybe not. But dammit, that’s how yer SPOSED to enjoy it.
Grazing sounds liberating from this attitude. It also may increase my actual reading by piquing my interest in a book that otherwise I would skip, daunted by the number of pages or arcane subject matter. I’m going to give it a try.
Well, good, I guess. But I never thought of it as a conscious approach -- just something I fell into and wondered if it wasn't universal. Maybe more people of consciousness would peg it for ADD.
Yeah, my first response to this was 'YER DOIN' IT WRONG" because I'm such a linear thinker and reader. I've got books that are intended to be leafed through at random (one beautiful volume on heirloom tomatoes, for example, that someone gave me) and they mostly just sit unread. Where's the sense of accomplishment that comes from reading cover to cover, huh?
Why not both--read it all the way through, return to graze later? Catch-22 is one of my read-through and grazing books. I'll open one of my copies to some random page and read through to the end of a chapter.
Silmarillion.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf
Pig Boats
The History of US Destroyers in WWII
And especially lately, Garmin avionics installation manuals.
Exciting stuff, no?
Well, you got the "no" right.
My tech reading days are mostly over – the only reason I still flip one open on occasion is for someone else's benefit.
From the time I was 10 years old until I was old enough to get a driver's license I spent every Saturday afternoon at the big downtown library in the county seat . My Mom would come to town to get groceries and whatever and drop me off the library on the way. Real quickly, though not so quick that anyone would notice, I migrated from the children's room to the main part of the library where I just knew they kept the good stuff.
I found it too! By the time I was 13 , I could skim your typical 380 page best seller for the hot parts, have them all found and read in about 20 minutes. So yeah, everything I know about sex I learned from Jackie Collins . Hey, could have been Mickey Spillane or Harold Robbins
The library had a great selection of books about film. . I know now that the collection was wide and deep. By the time I was 15 I bet I read a thousand books about film- including most of the key works. Now these were books about films that I was mostly never able to see. By the time I was a driving teenager I started to figure out places I could actually see some of these films that I've been reading about. Yellow Springs had the little art Theater in the day would pretty dependably show
some foreign classics. You usually didn't have to be a class member to sit in on some of the film shown at the film classes in the local universities. The first time I saw a Rules of the Game was it the Ohio State University about a 60 mile drive. I told my parents I was going to go play basketball and headed over to Columbus to see the film. While I was in the theater freezing rain had started and I put the car in the ditch three times on the way home. Twice people pulled over and pushed me out. The third time I drove half a mile through the ditch waiting for a place that I could pull the car back up on the road. I didn't get back till after midnight. I figured I was in big trouble - I was going to at least lose my car privileges. Nobody noticed I was gone. Charles Champlin had a series on PBS, Film Odyssey , which showed me just about everything I needed to see - that really changed my life.
This is a good topic I wish I had more time. I'm anxious to read everybody else's stories.
Anyway I have two bookcases at home one is full of horticulture textbooks, guides, manuals. I'm lucky. The books associated with my profession are the kind of books that you would read just because the pictures are beautiful and the information is interesting. I mean, no one's ever going to sit down and browse the physics textbook for fun.
The other bookcase is mostly full of film books, a lot of which I was exposed to at the library 57 years ago. I still own a copy of" The Films of Orson Welles" by Charles Higham
that I somehow got from the Wright State University Library.
I don't remember stealing it but I probably did. I think what happened is I meant to keep it over the summer break and never went back to school there. Probably go to hell for that- and deserve it!
"Nobody noticed I was gone" lol.
Film Odyssey changed my life too.
You are Macauley Culkin and I claim my 5 hands to the face screams
In South Dakota - no one can hear you scream.
How's the weather?
The weather is improving. Tuesday it rained and that turned into snow. I didn't much notice as I had a $2.5 million proposal due by 5 PM Tuesday. Wednesday they called off school as it got very cold and we had like a foot of snow so it was very slick, too. Thursday school started late and I think the high was -7 F. Today it is approaching +10 F, and it is supposed to get to about 40 tomorrow and 50 on Sunday
After you get familiar enough with the arc of the magnificently overstuffed "Moby-Dick," you can read a chapter here and there with thoughtful satisfaction. It helps me pay better attention to the craft of it, and besides, l always love his jokes (especially the naughty ones).
I keep Huck Finn around just for the last sentence. I pick up Blood Meridian at least once a year and open it to whatever. I believe I've read the first 3 chapters of Magnificent Ambersons 30 times.
Thank you. I have long said MB is one of the funniest books ever. Even claiming that it was in fact a comedy.
I do this myself all the time. Melville is phenomenal.
Catch-22. Open it anywhere.
I seem to recall most of the chapter headings are character names, yes? That's practically asking for it!
You're correct on both counts.
Many times, but now closing in on 70 life is short. Besides, I’ve forgotten just about all of them. These days I need a package undone and then wrapped back up with strapping tape and twine to get me to the end of the week….or month(s).
Miss you. Hope you’re well.
Hey BJS! Write to me!
My parents had a bound volume of New Yorker cartoons from the '20s through the '50s or so, and that was my main grazing material (along with others). Everything I learned about the Depression, WWII and early-to-mid-century culture in general I learned there. Heady stuff for a little girl in Columbus, Ohio.
If I did graze as a young 'un I grazed the World Book Encyclopedia
thought i was the only one!
Lately one of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood has been carrying National Geographics, late 60's to early 70's, and it's the perfect thing for when you wake up at 3am and can't get back to sleep. A couple of nights ago I read a bit about Chelsea, in London, which was quite the Mod place to be in early 1972, although quickly gentrifying, it's poorer tenants being evicted by Lord Cadogan, who owned 90 acres in downtown London.
I also picked up a copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, although I can't imagine I'll ever get through it, short as it is. But just in the first few pages I learned that early 19th century druggists in Manchester would have the opium pills lined up on the counter on a Saturday ready to go, for the factory workers when they got off work. Factory work paid so little the workers couldn't afford beer, opium was cheaper.
Great book about Opium is Steven Martin’s “Opium Fiend.” Guy got interested in collecting Opium smoking paraphernalia which it turns out has a very interesting history.
Definitely do this with poetry anthologies. I do not tend to do this with fiction at all. But I do comfort rereads all the time. For me it’s the narrative that I enjoy, and coming upon the special bits is an extra pleasure.
The Year of the Quiet Sun, by Wilson Tucker, IMHO the greatest time-travel novel ever written. It's fairly episodic, so once you know the full story, you can read the sections out of order. Top of the list for me is The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, but I'm not sure it counts in this context.
I have to confess that I don't read novels and such in bits, though with books I've had in my life for decades like The Andromeda Strain there are passages I remember from when I was young and didn't understand some of the plot, like the James Bond films I went back to later in life and realized there's a lot I ignored tying together the action scenes.
But I do have a class of books I call "flip-through" books, large format books of mostly pictures I peruse when I can not brain enough to deal with plots. An example is the book of early auto ads Dad had in the 80s and which I picked up a copy of several years back.
Where I'm bad about buying and not using is RPGs - The Collection I mostly have never actually PLAYED, but which I love to study and think about. There's something comfortable about those 1st Edition AD&D books I keep going back to, particularly the Monster Manual with its classic art and bare-bones descriptions.
Where I'm bad about buying and not using is RPGs
I am similar. Back when I used to play frequently, getting my group to try a new system was tough. Some of us were up for a game of Paranoia or other different ones but a couple of the guys only really wanted to play D&D
These^^are delightfully un-ironic posts about D&D.
Oh, I am a constant reader: and constant rereader: and having run a bookstore gave me access to stuff I'd never imagined..
When the ex died, she had boxes and boxes of books she'd got at yard sales for her hoard: and a few were treasures: and I recycled a bunch into the bookstore's Used shelf. There were easily 5000 books.
I winnowed that down to something I thought reasonable and we had maybe 400 books and lost those in the fire...I never finished "A Manuscript Found in Saragossa", and maybe one of the three different translations of "Tale of Gengi" (always fun to compare)...
Among the books I replaced were one I dip into for exactly comfort reasons: R. Christiansen's "Paris Babylon", his rambling anecdotal take on the French Second Empire, Paris as it's center of culture, and how those who lived through it and the Siege of Paris/Commune saw it. It's rich, and immensely interesting to me. Recommended, if only for the people he quotes..
I re read Tolkein less now, but there were times it was a comfort, though now it's increasingly less interesting (the poetry is crap)...but I have LOTR and the Silmarillion.
Not quite the same thing: remember M. Twain's summation of the Book of Mormon? "Laudanum in print?" Having been sort of forced into Bible study as a kids, the Oxford Companion to the Bible (80s edition) is the book I read to put me to sleep. The scholarship is sound, and shows just how much evangelical Bible thumping is crap: Pick an article and I'm usually out in 15-20 minutes.
After the home burned, Terry Pratchett was a great comfort: the early Diskworld novels are pretty weak, and intended as send ups of Sword and Sorcery fantasy novels (Cohen the Barbarian, anyone?): but the later ones become social satire and commentary in medieval motley.
One day I'll read "Tom Jones" cover to cover...
I would disagree about the early TP books being weak, they aren't as good as most of the later ones, but really only The Color of Money and The Light Fantastic were send ups of swords and sorcery, and even those had a satirical look at Western attitudes about tourists from the East. Also, TP did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser before Cohen
2 marks for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
Well, I'll reread any of the Diskworld novels: but the ones before Guards, Guards seem rather different to those that followed.
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were Fritz Leiber, right?
Well, they might be different but Equal Rites, Mort, Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids are not Sword and Sorcery books. Mort is generally considered one of the best books in the whole series
Yes F & GM were Fritz Leiber. They were at the end of the first short story in Colour of Magic as Bravd and the Weasel
Tom Jones was delightful both times I read it 50 years ago...
I adore Tom Jones