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 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...
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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?
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!
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).
Catch-22. Open it anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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...