I wait for and want some sort of inspiration.
It's similar to the dilemma I used to face back in the days when there were whole shops that specialised in selling CDs. Before that, those same shops sold (vinyl) records and cassettes. It was an exciting thing browsing in those shops and buying an album...or a single - you could buy singles in those days. Now I never buy CDs. I don't need to when everything is free on youtube.
the dilemma though, was, whenever I wasn't going to buy anything, but was just browsing....and shops like HMV had listening stations where you could listen to some albums....when I wasn't actually going to buy anything, I would see all these albums that I wanted, but when I was going to buy one, sometimes it was hard to find anything I wanted. So, there were a lot that I was drawn to or liked, but, when it came to the point of actually buying one, it seemed like none really crossed that line.
I have a lot of books that I want to read, and I buy a lot of books because I want to read them, but sometimes - especially when I'm in a particular mood - when it comes to the question of - OK, what do I want to actually read right now? nothing really stands out as a choice.
A lot of the best books I've read, I picked them up kind of capriciously - thinking, this might be good to read - or I've had to read them for courses. My favourite three novels - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch - I read in the first two years of my English degree, which I started in my late 20s. It's funny to think that, just as I didn't know about those great novels before I had to read them for uni, there are probably novels and other books that are really good that I don't know about yet.
The experience of reading good literature is sublime. Or maybe I should say 'good books' because literature is associated with prose fiction, but non fiction and other genres can also be very good. But, now that I think of it, there's a particular kind of deep enjoyment that novels offer that, I don't know if other forms do or can. There's a kind of immersion that happens with novels.
but getting back to the question of choosing, even if I was inclined to follow the order I've planned out in arranging my physical books, the situation has become complicated by e-books. I have my kindle books (which are also on my computer in the kindle desk-top app), a lot of pdf's (67), and a 41 page (and counting) document with titles and links to project gutenberg and other websites. so it's hard to put them all in an order. Oh, and I also have a couple of hundred books (and growing) that I've put in my Amazon account...I put them in my cart and then click 'save for later'...I like lists.
maybe I should read Infinite Jest...for some reason, lately I've been captivated by interviews of David Foster Wallace and other people talking about him and his work. I listen to them while I'm doing other things, like writing this
I think I might read, at least for a while, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, because I was thinking earlier about good writing and that book came to mind. I remember buying that book. I hadn't planned to, but I came across it and flipped through it, reading parts, and it was just a delight...enchanting, beautiful, vibrant....
but then, when I read a few parts of it just now, it touches on topics that cause me pain....touching wounds
I think another reason I was thinking about Sylvia Plath is because I saw a post on twitter about a volume of her letters that was published last year, and apparently it's pretty amazing. It's a 2 volume set edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (who also edited the unabridged journals), with all her letters (I think), unabridged and without revision. They're huge too...vol 2 is 1088 pages and vol 1 is 1440. I already have some of her letters in a book called Letters Home which was edited, and the letters selected, by her mother, and (of course) most of but not all of the letters in it are to her mother.
oh...I just read a bit from Letters which had the opposite effect that I described earlier...it made me smile and feel good:
People are still infinitely more important to me than books, so I will never be an academic scholar. I know this and know also that my kind of vital intellectual curiosity could never be happy in the grubbing detail of a PhD thesis.
yeah, I like that....
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