Reading Habits
The other day the Mrs. went to A Large Chain Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named For Fear Of Attracting The Corporate Blog Searchers. We’ll just call them LCB for short. Oh, and the Corporate Blog Searchers I refer to are those folks whose job it is to monitor word of mouth on the World Wide Web and try to counter any negative WOM about their company. I had one of those folks come right here a couple of months ago, remember? Then again, maybe it is nice to have strangers drop by. So let’s just call LCB “Barnes and Noble” instead.
The Mrs. asked me if she should pick up any of the books from my Amazon list (another corporate name, another potential visitor, whee!) and I gave her a list of three titles, all fiction. Normally I like to be reading two books at once, one fiction and the other non-fiction and I pick what to read at a given moment based on my mood, the surroundings and how much time I have. I just started a non-fiction book so fiction was the way to go.
One of my traits that I’m not particularly proud of is that I am a very slow book reader. There are several reasons for this, excuses maybe including that I stare at a computer screen all day at work and I read at least one newspaper a day and I subscribe to a few food magazines and read stuff on the Web. Plus until recently my eyes didn’t work so well and they got tired quickly. Now my eyes are fixed, but the downside of that is I appear to have re-developed a tendency to get motion sick while reading on the bus so my commute-reading time is generally limited to about 10 minutes unless I commute via the subway-ferry route. The Mrs. on the other hand goes through books quicker than she goes through tissues in allergy season which makes me jealous; then again some of the books she reads are less interesting to me than used tissues so it’s a trade off. A trait we both share however is a tendency to push through a book even when we’ve lost interest. I don’t know if it’s out of some sense of obligation to the author or “I spent the money/took the time to find this at the library so I’m damn well going to read it” or an unrealistic feeling of optimism that the book will become more interesting. I tend to take this trait to a new level: I do my damndest to not exceed the two-books-at-a-time limit by forcing myself to finish one of the books I am currently reading before starting a new one. This sometimes has the downside of making me rush through a book if I’m more excited about the next one. It also makes me very conscious of page counts: I only occasionally read books greater than 300 pages long and almost never read anything that cracks the 400 page threshold unless I’m really, really interested in the subject or in the author’s work.
This makes me painfully middlebrow. I’m OK with that. I’m just some dope who went to a CUNY school and got a BBA. I don’t have any kind of liberal arts background other than the prerequisites CUNY gave us. Oh well. No “Great Books” or “Famous Dead White Guys” background for me. No formal training in the Western Canon or whatever the hell it’s called. My simple criterion for great writing, well, for great art in general is this: it is something that let’s you know you’re not alone. Something that awakens your mind and your spirit after the untold hours of dealing with the soul-destroying shit we all have to endure. The idiotic functions we have to perform, the empty-faced co-workers, the crowds of the already-dead souls clogging the streets in front of the rest of us, the countless hours of pointless interaction following scripts we’ve written for ourselves through our behavior over months and years and decades. Anything that elevates our waking moments above all that garbage is what I call great art.
Pompous, aren’t I? Especially for someone so woefully undereducated. Well nobody told you you had to stick around and read this.
Of course, the moments of “great art” are rare. Most of the time what you get is “good art” which is simply a distraction from the previously enumerated fires of hell. It can be funny or clever or interesting and it’s just fine. The great moments should be rare. The great moments are justifiably difficult to find. The good moments are usually good enough.
So the Mrs. got one of the books from the list I supplied and I looked at the book and put in on the nightstand because I was still plowing through a different (mostly) fiction book. It was a book of short stories, introductions, essays and other scrapings from the bottom of the beautiful barrel that is the work of Charles Bukowski. Frankly, a lot of it was crap, and ol’ Hank knew it was crap when he typed it but he had to earn a living. And now whoever gets the royalty payments for Buk’s work gets to benefit from this. Good for them if they lived with the man when he was alive, he was a bit of a handful. There were a few sentences of Great Art here and there, places where you could just catch a fleeting glimpse of the genius who wrote “Post Office” and my favorite poem of all time, “The Shoelace”. Some of the rest was pretty good, better than I could do in any case but a lot of it was obviously just dashed out for a paycheck. There were some pointers on horses that I might use if I ever go to the track. There were some pointers on other aspects of living that I will hopefully never have to use. There were some observations of people that were disturbingly close to my own sentiments.
I sat in the basement with a couple of the cats and finished reading all of it. The cats were in a good mood. The rain had broken the humidity of the day and we could open the windows. It was a good night. There's really nothing more you should ask for or expect. Now I get to start another fiction book. Now I get to look for those moments again. We all have to have some way to kill the time waiting for the inevitable, don’t we?
The Mrs. asked me if she should pick up any of the books from my Amazon list (another corporate name, another potential visitor, whee!) and I gave her a list of three titles, all fiction. Normally I like to be reading two books at once, one fiction and the other non-fiction and I pick what to read at a given moment based on my mood, the surroundings and how much time I have. I just started a non-fiction book so fiction was the way to go.
One of my traits that I’m not particularly proud of is that I am a very slow book reader. There are several reasons for this, excuses maybe including that I stare at a computer screen all day at work and I read at least one newspaper a day and I subscribe to a few food magazines and read stuff on the Web. Plus until recently my eyes didn’t work so well and they got tired quickly. Now my eyes are fixed, but the downside of that is I appear to have re-developed a tendency to get motion sick while reading on the bus so my commute-reading time is generally limited to about 10 minutes unless I commute via the subway-ferry route. The Mrs. on the other hand goes through books quicker than she goes through tissues in allergy season which makes me jealous; then again some of the books she reads are less interesting to me than used tissues so it’s a trade off. A trait we both share however is a tendency to push through a book even when we’ve lost interest. I don’t know if it’s out of some sense of obligation to the author or “I spent the money/took the time to find this at the library so I’m damn well going to read it” or an unrealistic feeling of optimism that the book will become more interesting. I tend to take this trait to a new level: I do my damndest to not exceed the two-books-at-a-time limit by forcing myself to finish one of the books I am currently reading before starting a new one. This sometimes has the downside of making me rush through a book if I’m more excited about the next one. It also makes me very conscious of page counts: I only occasionally read books greater than 300 pages long and almost never read anything that cracks the 400 page threshold unless I’m really, really interested in the subject or in the author’s work.
This makes me painfully middlebrow. I’m OK with that. I’m just some dope who went to a CUNY school and got a BBA. I don’t have any kind of liberal arts background other than the prerequisites CUNY gave us. Oh well. No “Great Books” or “Famous Dead White Guys” background for me. No formal training in the Western Canon or whatever the hell it’s called. My simple criterion for great writing, well, for great art in general is this: it is something that let’s you know you’re not alone. Something that awakens your mind and your spirit after the untold hours of dealing with the soul-destroying shit we all have to endure. The idiotic functions we have to perform, the empty-faced co-workers, the crowds of the already-dead souls clogging the streets in front of the rest of us, the countless hours of pointless interaction following scripts we’ve written for ourselves through our behavior over months and years and decades. Anything that elevates our waking moments above all that garbage is what I call great art.
Pompous, aren’t I? Especially for someone so woefully undereducated. Well nobody told you you had to stick around and read this.
Of course, the moments of “great art” are rare. Most of the time what you get is “good art” which is simply a distraction from the previously enumerated fires of hell. It can be funny or clever or interesting and it’s just fine. The great moments should be rare. The great moments are justifiably difficult to find. The good moments are usually good enough.
So the Mrs. got one of the books from the list I supplied and I looked at the book and put in on the nightstand because I was still plowing through a different (mostly) fiction book. It was a book of short stories, introductions, essays and other scrapings from the bottom of the beautiful barrel that is the work of Charles Bukowski. Frankly, a lot of it was crap, and ol’ Hank knew it was crap when he typed it but he had to earn a living. And now whoever gets the royalty payments for Buk’s work gets to benefit from this. Good for them if they lived with the man when he was alive, he was a bit of a handful. There were a few sentences of Great Art here and there, places where you could just catch a fleeting glimpse of the genius who wrote “Post Office” and my favorite poem of all time, “The Shoelace”. Some of the rest was pretty good, better than I could do in any case but a lot of it was obviously just dashed out for a paycheck. There were some pointers on horses that I might use if I ever go to the track. There were some pointers on other aspects of living that I will hopefully never have to use. There were some observations of people that were disturbingly close to my own sentiments.
I sat in the basement with a couple of the cats and finished reading all of it. The cats were in a good mood. The rain had broken the humidity of the day and we could open the windows. It was a good night. There's really nothing more you should ask for or expect. Now I get to start another fiction book. Now I get to look for those moments again. We all have to have some way to kill the time waiting for the inevitable, don’t we?
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