Reading
Ever since High School I’ve dreamed of my dotage, in which I’d have a grand, yet cozy library, filled floor to ceiling with books. It would be outfitted with dark wood paneling, plush leather armchairs with matching footstools, a writing desk or two, maybe a deep sofa, definitely a large stone fireplace, and a well-stocked liquor caddy with crystal tumblers and stemware. And if I got lucky, it would have a view of the ocean, where I could watch storms roll in, enjoy the rising or setting sun, and contemplate life while reading all the books I’d collected but never gotten around to reading well during my younger years.
Now, into early middle age, I guess, I’m on my way to being able to fill up such a space, with boxes and boxes of books in storage, some down in my basement, and others filling up three or four good sized bookcases in my modest San Francisco home. The dedicated library with all its accoutrements and the ocean view remains an object of fantasy, but if I make it to an age where the word dotage applies, well, there’s still time.
In the meanwhile, I love to read and read I do, every chance I get. These days I do a lot of my day-to-day reading online, surfing the Internet, mostly for news and opinion on current events or for information on some product or process that interests me. The links on the blogroll to the right of this page form a pretty representative list of the places I alight in cyberia on a regular basis.
But nothing can take the place of sitting quietly, undisturbed, with a book or periodical in hand, reading words on a page. That opportunity is much harder to come by in recent times and for me occurs either early in the morning in post-meditation or on the john, or late in the evening on my living room sofa or in bed. Sessions tend to be brief in any case, for in the mornings there never seems time enough to linger, and in the evenings sleep often conquers my desire to keep going for just a few more pages.
I’ll endeavor to update this page from time to time with comments on whatever might be interesting to me in the hope that, if you choose to read them they might interest you as well.
November 28, 2006
At the moment I’m reading two selections passed on to me by my good friend, the great political strategist and illustrious guitar man, Buddy Gill.
Prometheus Rising is a fascinating book by Robert Anton Wilson, who takes the psychological underpinnings of Timothy Leary’s theories of human consciousness, applies Gurdjieff’s self-observation exercises, quantum mechanics, yoga, relativity concepts, and a good bit of humor to describe how the human mind works, and suggests how you might go about making the most of yours. Challenging, but well worth the work to understand what he’s trying to get at. You may never see your boss, your spouse, or the person ahead of you in the checkout line in the same light again.
Freakonomics is an eye-opening journey into the thought processes and methodologies that have made co-author Steven D. Levitt perhaps the most renowned, iconoclastic economist of his generation. He’s young, only 40 next year, and he studies the vast array of forces at work in the world with a decidedly non-partisan, dispassionate agenda. He strives to discover and define incentives among competing interests to reveal how everything is just as one might expect it to be.
Each month I linger over Harper’s Magazine. For my money it’s the most interesting periodical in publication today.
And I just picked up Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony Or Survival.
Can’t wait to see whether it keeps me awake nights, or puts me to sleep. Definitely not post-meditation or john reading.