Weasel’s Road of Good Intentions
At this very moment I’m looking at my supply of good intentions – sitting on my desk as it happens, and not paving the road outside my door. It would be interesting if my road were paved with my good intentions, since these take the form of books and that would be an interesting and colorful road. It’s tempting to chase a metaphor down the lane and state that if e-readers become any more prevalent we might as well use books as paving stones. Perhaps you’re like me and fighting the rising e-tide and keeping hold of paper and ink, but I fear we’re going the way of the dinosaur, the dodo, and the good job after college.
My stack is colorful, varied, and like all good intentions – mostly unused. It’s not really my fault. The covers are so bright, the fonts so enticing, the bindings so lush and there was a — okay, now I’m flashing on John Belushi in The Blues Brothers declaring the equivalent to a woman with an automatic weapon. Do you see my eyebrows raised over my soulful green eyes? Is it working? Do I need to run now?
Damn! Thought I had you there for a minute.
Books, books, and books. They line my walls at home, they slide around in the trunk of my car and at the bottom of my gym bag, and now they’re sitting at my desk waiting to go back to the library. I can take them, it’s just across the quad, but I’m loathe to give them up yet. I’ve only read one of them from cover to cover, made it halfway through another and merely perused the remainders. It’s not that they aren’t good titles, they’re delightful, but the problem is with me.
It’s like this; have you ever found yourself eating a bag of french fries for dinner when you could have had a salad? Gone for the cereal when the yogurt was sitting right there in the fridge? Picked up a cookie and ignored the apple? Those are the comfort-carb blues. I have tossed out many a bag of salad soup along with my best intentions and an empty cookie box, and these books are my mental equivalent. With this wealth of learning and entertainment at my fingertips, I have wasted my precious reading time with familiar novels and I’m not sure why. Look at my choices:
Narcissism: Denial of the True Self – Alexander Lowen, M.D.
Absinthe: History in a Bottle – Barnaby Conrad III
Adventures Among the Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions – Mark W. Moffett
In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan
The Hundred-Food Journey – Richard C. Morais
Apollo’s Angels – Jennifer Homans
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming – Mike Brown
Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages – Patrick McGovern
I made it all of the way through The Hundred-Foot Journey and even wrote a blog about it. Adventures Among the Ants was great but that trek ended three-quarters of the way through the book, (the photos are astonishing). Narcissism was informative and (self?) absorbing but more of a reference book. Absinthe, like the liquor itself, was not what I expected. Pluto might have been a great murder mystery but remains unsolved as far as I’m concerned. Pollan’s Defense of Food boiled down to the simplest sentence: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Apollo’s Angels is a history of ballet and really should be more exciting. The writer left in all the history but none of the gossip and snark that makes a good study of the arts. The Quest for Wine… still has a chance, it’s going back home with me tonight.
So why the failure on my part to reach my reading goals? It’s a perfect storm of reasons; partly my own unrealistic goal setting habits, partly the lack of time, but mostly just underestimating the need for a little mental comfort food right now. So many things are changing, personally and professionally, that a safe and familiar book is like an old bathrobe after a day in a suit and heels. My daily reading time doesn’t happen until after 10pm when I’m trying to wind down and go to sleep and maybe world food politics and technicolor bug closeups aren’t the best plan. If I’m going to browse this selection right before dropping into dream-time, I shouldn’t be surprised if a giant ant in a tutu shows up in my favorite bar and asks me if I want a cookie.
Yes, please.
Imagine a world where all the books are electronic, and are sitting in your reader, waiting. No more hard covers that crack when you open them for the first time. No more wafting smells of ink and mustiness . How would feel then?
| Posted 2 months agoI would feel like I’d lost something very precious.
| Posted 2 days, 8 hours ago