Reading Habits

Once upon a time, I read mostly fiction. Occasionally, I would pick up something non-fiction, like a John McPhee, but mostly it was fiction. All kinds. There were the usual suspects like Hemingway and Hesse but along the way I waded up lots of different creeks. Sometimes it was with a Maugham, Murduch, Dos Passos, Barth, or Bellow. Other times it was with a Walker Percy, Wolfe or Flannery O'Connor. What is it about southern writers? Maybe if I had been born in Mississippi or North Carolina I might actually be able to pen a thing two. For a time I was into detective novels starting with Hammett and Chandler. Ah, the code. Did I mention my thing for French trash like Sagan and Collette? Best read on a beach but then what isn't it? For a time too I seem to live on short stories... Conrad, more Maugham, Hemingway at his best in the Nick Adams stories and for that matter try "Tales of the South Seas" by Michener. Question. Why did Michener later think that 1000 pages was better than 200? The best, though, maybe Louis Becke's "Pacific Tales." Great short stories. Just pulled it off the shelf. Time for another read. And not to be forgotten are the heavy weights who from time to time I couldn't resist... Kafka, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Kazantzakis, Melville, Joyce. You get the picture.

Several times a year John Hershey and I would drive to the lower east end to the Barnes and Noble "Annex." Upstairs in a large open/warehouse area were bins, not shelves of books. Dozens and dozens of bins all filled with used books. Inside the front cover the books were hand marked. Hardbacks were a dollar or two but the paperbacks were 50 cents or less. John and I would come home with grocery bags filled with books. You can imagine what 20 bucks bought. Sometimes the good old days actually were the good old days. We would get there mid-morning, fill one bag by lunch time and then head over to McSorley's for an ale or two and a ham and cheese sandwich. Heading to NY anytime soon? Go to McSorley, the oldest pub in NY. In the early years when we frequented McSorley's it was males only. Even after it was forced to serve women there was a lone bathroom without a lock on the door. I suspect by now McSorley's has become enlightened but it wasn't by choice. After lunch John and I would go back to the Annex for more bags of books. At 3:00 we would drag ourselves away. Once we stayed until rush hour and spent 4 years and I mean 4 YEARS in the Holland Tunnel. We didn't make that mistake again. But books and McSorley's what more could you want.

Once upon a time, I read mostly fiction but now it's a different story. Now I mostly read non-fiction. Currently, it's a book about a woman who enrolls in the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris after losing her job. A fun read.
Before that it was a book about the Black Hole War. Didn't know there was a war over Black Holes? Neither did I until I read the book. The issue, it turns out, is whether or not information that tumbles into a Black Hole is irretrievably lost. Okay, so it's a little esoteric but I learned all kinds of things. For example, if you're riding around in your space ship and accidentally take a wrong turn into a Black Hole don't worry. It's true that you'll eventually get crushed into the point of singularity at the bottom of the Black Hole but it will take millions of years before you get there and you'll be long dead so what's the big deal. By the way, you'll be glad to know the answer is "no." Information is never lost, though the battle to solve the issue raged for more than 20 years before an Argentine physicist solved the problem. The book before that was about the Lincoln's marriage, a loud boisterous affair but a love story nonetheless.

Why the mish mash about my reading habits? What's the point? The answer is I'm wondering why my preference has changed? Why fiction before and non-fiction now? My best guess? The way I see life is that we live it in stages. A stage might be years or a short period of time. For example, there's the college stage, or kids in diaper stage, or have no money stage, or empty nest stage before retirement stage. Maj0r surgery and rehab is a stage. See what I'm getting at. We go through stages some of which are thrust on us and some we choose. For whatever reason once I was in a fiction stage and now I'm in a non-fiction stage. Will I go back to fiction? Good question. But I'm thinking not. I'm having way too much fun with non-fiction. But as the law of quantum mechanics says there's no way to be sure. Probability is always in the picture.

So, where are you when it comes to reading? Post a comment. I'd love to get a dialogue going.