So I'm Reading...

I read. It’s a thing. Generally speaking I have four books going at any given time. My list shows three because I just finished one. The one I finished is called Disappearing Acts. It’s a novel by Terry McMillan, who also wrote Waiting To Exhale, and it’s not very good, but I read it and it’s done. So the next one up is called Buffalo Girls and it’s by Larry McMurtry, who I’ve been reading a lot of lately. It you going to read McMurtry, read The Last Picture Show.

So I read four books at once. Now I only have two eyes, and even using both at once, I can only read one book at any given instant. But what happens is this. After I read about 100 pages I switch. And I keep doing that, juggling four books that way. It’s not that complicated.

I read sometimes in the evening, always on the weekend, especially Friday night and Saturday afternoon, Saturday morning after I’m done with the paper. I always have a book in waiting rooms, in coffee shops, between classes when I go to school, which I haven’t done since 2000 and will undoubtedly not do again. And by big reading time is on public transit, to and from work, on the bus and on the metro, on the metro and on the bus, assuming I get a seat, and if I don’t fall asleep.

Usually I have two novels, the other one right now being Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. I’m no great Dickens fan, though I’ve read Great Expectations and David Copperfield (“OH my lungs and liver!!”) and A Tale Of Two Cities. I’ve not read Oliver Twist nor A Christmas Carol. I don’t know if he does it in his other books, but in this one Dickens puts a lot of commas in weird places, doing what Lynn Truss calls “using a comma like a stupid person.” And so we have “When Barnaby returned with the bread, the sight of the pious old pilgrim smoking his pipe and making himself so thoroughly at home, appeared to surprise him even more.” Maybe punctuation was different then.

I read books about music, and they are usually fairly pathetic, but I read them anyway, and now it’s a biography of Hendrix which is better than average, and the other book I have going on now is from a collection that I inherited from someone, a collection of books about Israel and about the Holocaust, and some are a bit odd, but none are as odd as this one, a book called The Secret War Against The Jews, which is an unsettling combination of, one the one hand, phenomenally extensive and hard gotten research, and, on the other hand, the hysterical conspiracy theory ravings of the authors. Oh well.

Now that’s not it. I’m also reading a book about ASP.Net, and I read that at work, a few pages every day. And I’m reading a book from the Beth Zion library, and I read that during Saturday morning service when I have a few minutes. And there are one or two others that I catch a page of now and then.

And the sad thing is that my eyes are going. Oh yes. Old age is coming on. I’ve already been wearing reading glasses for five years, and it’s getting to where I’m just going to have replace my eyes.

Good. Then I can finish this other book about .net remoting….