#90

Wooooo boy, what a day! Got up at four, and at five sharp I set myself to a walkabout and but for two ten-minute rests, a short while up a tree, and fifteen minutes warming up with a cup of soup, I was constantly stepping. One step after another, and I did not cross my home threshold till some time after the clock rang three of the evening. Pretty great first walk of the new year, I give it an A plus. I would hazard that I made around thirty miles.

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You'd think I'd have more than that. I generated a lot of ideas, yes, but I'm a little tired--not beat, not like I am after the usual walks on top a shift dealio, and I do work tomorrow. I feel like reading. I'm gonna read. What have I read since I last talked about books? A bunch of Shigeru Mizuki's Gege No Kitaro stories, this graphic novel by this dude LRNZ called Golem, two books of Roald Dahl's short stories (this "best of" dealio Hyperion put out which took from a bunch of his other collections and also my childhood friend The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More), Lightsabers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, part of the Young Jedi Knights Series (I am working hard on rebuilding my collection of these books, as well as my collection of Animorphs, the top shareholders in Stuff I Regret Giving To Charity, I Mean Not Really But, Hell, Kind Of Sometimes LLC.), 

Just started reading The Dark Is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. I am three-quarters done with the first one; mad respect for the game so far. I especially and extremely love the attention to detail, thoroughness, and I instinctively honor a person who knows how not to rush a good story or push the characters in it out of themselves in order to rudely advance plot. This is a too-common weakness, but it is absent here, as are basically all the common weaknesses. 

I have known about and been meaning to read and not reading these books for a full seventeen years now. The way some things keep slipping away from one is nothing short of unconscionable.

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You may have noticed that aside from a "serious" novel or three here and there I've been reading what some might call middling fare, heavy on the Young Adult. To this I can only say that YA is and has most often been where the muhfuckin fire be at, so ditch, bitch.

Also that I have been recalibrating from some serious life shifts and stuff like that is very grounding and nourishing, and finally that serious readers elevate that upon which they cast their eyes as much as the reverse; I read what some might call pap, or pulp, or pornography, or hack-work, and I use these terms for certain kinds of writing myself--but much more sparingly than most. 

Truth is a lot of books are very good, more than a million tons of them, even though people like to act like only a few every year are and probably about fifty all through history are really great or whatever. 

No. No. This is not a good way to think. There is more great writing than you will be able to read in your lifetime. Most of it, the vast majority of it, people will try to make you feel stupid for enjoying, or act smarter than you because they have memorized hardcore lessons about five or six great books and think that means they don't need to read anymore.

They can't change how great it is, though. They do not have that power.

Anyhow, I do read like, Faulkner or whatever, too. I know about Hamlet's whole deal and blah-de-blah-de-bloo-bah.

Just not hitting that grade of stuff a lot right now.


--JL