Tag Archives: reading

PROMPT: Books

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What books do you want to read?
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I’d love to read all the good ones, but even with my voracious approach to reading I barely make a dent.

Here’s the top of the list of books I’m excited about right at the moment, by category:

Travel lit related to an impending trip to the Caucasus region: “A Man Was Going Down the Road” by Otar Chiladze; “Ali and Nino” by Kurban Said; “The Burning Tigris” by Peter Balakian; and “Kvachi” by Mikheil Javakhishvili.

Related to a Chinese literature (in translation) kick that I’m on: “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” Luo Guanzhong; “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” by Pu Songling; “In the Thick Woods a Deer Is Seen at Times” and “A Pair of Swallows Fly” [The latter two are bilingual poetry translations of works from the Tang Dynasty and the Book of Poetry, respectively.]

Books and editions coming out this year: “Judo Unleashed” by Neil Ohlenkamp; a new verse translation of Kamo no Chomei’s “Hojoki” translated by Matthew Stavros; “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen; and a new translation of Natsumi Soseki’s “Kokoro.”

Related to things I’m working on presently: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Daniel Kahneman; “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell; “Gut Feelings” by Gerd Gigerenzer; and “The Meaning of Travel” by Emily Thomas.

Long overdue: “Metamorphoses” by Ovid; “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, and I should probably finish Joyce’s “Ulysses”

Odds and Ends: “Rental Person Who Does Nothing” by Shoji Morimoto; “Is This Anything?” by Jerry Seinfeld; “Sick in the Head” by Judd Apatow.

Are you sorry you asked yet?

PROMPT: Fun

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List five things you do for fun.
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1.) Read; 2.) Move; 3.) Juggle; 4.) Hike; 5.) Breathe

Five Wise Lines (Jan 2024)

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Every so often I run into a sentence that blows my mind a little bit. Here are a few recent examples:

We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

William james

One must read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles to be an educated man.

Old chinese adage (As Translated by ha jin in The Banished Immortal)

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg

Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing.

Ludwig wittgenstein

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

John stuart mill

PROMPT: Write Space

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You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?

Just a small, quiet room with a window for day and a light for the night. Minimalist. The less to distract, the better.

“There is no Frigate like a Book” (1286) by Emily Dickinson [w/ Audio]

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There is no Frigate like a Book
   To take us Lands away
 Nor any Coursers like a Page
   Of prancing Poetry --
 This Traverse may the poorest take
   Without oppress of Toll --
 How frugal is the Chariot
   That bears the Human Soul --

PROMPT: Less

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What could you do less of?
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Truth be told, the answer is reading, but as hardcore addictions go, the side-effects are better than with heroin or meth (and almost completely opposite, though it does sometimes make me sleepy.) So, I think I’ll go with social media, which I probably do less of than average, but that’s still way too much.

PROMPT: Currently Reading

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What book are you reading right now?

I’m reading The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi because I try to read some literature from every place to which I travel, and this one is with respect to Taiwan.

As I’m never reading just one book, there’s also Geoffrey West’s Scale, Lukianoff & Schlott’s The Cancelling of the American Mind, Stephen Wolfram’s The Second Law, and others.

Five Wise Lines from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature, a complete impossibility!

Algernon

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read.

ALgernon

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

Algernon

One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.

Algernon; [fyi: “Bunburying” is the use of appointments with ficticious individuals to get out of one’s duties and obligations.]

One should always eat muffins quite calmly.

Algernon

PROMPT: Possessions

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What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
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Probably go to the cemetery to read gravestones. I have a reading addiction that would be itching with no books or e-reader. Of course, I would soon be arrested for sitting on graves in the nude. After being booked for public indecency, they would give me food and lodging… problem solved.

Poetic Absorption [Free Verse]

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Read at the speed 
  of absorption,
   (not consumption.)

Sit with the ephemera
  that boils off upon
   each read.

It will be different
  the next time.

Don't memorize.
 
That hammers it into
   some dark, heavy pit
    that it was never meant to be --

a thing that sinks in water
   and plummets from the air. 

Hammering cleaves its wings,
   and it becomes hopeless in the flow --
    staggering like a deranged drunk
     in the dark. 

When you read it,
    only read it. 

Don't anticipate.

Be surprised.