If I have any sort of an addiction, it's to books and television.
Richard Foster, I believe, would induce me to kill my addictions by
purging my world of accumulated books, a notion I fiercely resist, thus
proving his point. Television? I don't know what he'd tell me about
television. Considering he is a Quaker, I can make a good guess. When I
started thinking about the two things that mastered me today, Richard
Foster's name came into my mind because he writes about the discipline
of simplicity in his book, Celebration of Discipline, which my husband and I read together with our friend Damon last year.
Another trip to the library today, and I came home with even more books. I kept the two Stephen Hawking's from last week, as well as Physics of the Impossible and the Surprised by Oxford memoir. Again, I don't have time to read them, won't get to them this borrowing session, will probably renew them, but I couldn't give them up just yet. Odd since they sit in a bag in the corner of my dining room day-in and day-out. I made two mistakes this afternoon. I glanced at new non-fiction books shelf, and I set foot in the Friends of the Library Bookstore.
On the new non-fiction books shelf, and yes that is books, plural, on purpose:
The cover of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds caught my eye. I picked it up. I put it down again. I picked it up; I put it down again. I thought about that book all the way out the door and to the car. I totally want to read a book about pop culture's addiction to its own past. I also liked the feel of the paper cover and the way the back matter was formatted. Nope. Didn't find out anything about the book while it was in my hands. I only know that it will be coming home with me at some future date. For reasons I can't fully explain, I have a bit of an obsession with pop culture. Maybe it's an anthropological interest; maybe I just like to be entertained. I think it's some sort of combination of the two, probably going back to my urge to understand this world we live in, this world I'm not entirely comfortable with. Some of it is the best and safest way I know to engage.
Next to Retromania on the shelf I saw a book with an oddly familiar cover. I look at it now and see only the slightest similarity to James K.A. Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism, but the name Derrida does occur on the cover. And there's a strong vertical and horizontal element in the design. The book is Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy by Anais Spitzer, from the Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory series published by continuum books. So both books are from a series. They have that much in common, right? I like the feel of the book. I like the cover. I like the fact that the book is brand new. Beyond that I'm basically a pretender. The word "Philosophy" draws me in. I've made this same complaint before. Just because I want to read a book, doesn't mean I'm equipped to read or understand it. And I'll have you know that reading and understanding can be two separate events.
As soon as I arrived a the library this afternoon, I noted that the book store was open and wanted to go in, but I held myself back long enough to get the DVDs my children had asked for. I was afraid this would happen. I was afraid that even though I was looking for a particular book they were unlikely to have I'd probably spend money on more books I don't have room to store.
I purchased three books, and looked at more:
The Life of Graham Greene Volume I: 1904-1939 by Norman Sherry. I adore Graham Greene as a writer, and I wonder how many volumes there are in this series. Maybe only three? Of course the inside flap of the book doesn't say. I am slightly alarmed by the blurb on the cover in which Margaret Atwood claims Greene's times are described "in Proustian detail." How much detail could Sherry possibly go into?
Poetry: An Introduction by John Strachan and Richard Terry. Just this morning I was lamenting the fact that I didn't know or remember any of the poetical conventions. I remember what an iamb is, I think, but not what is it's opposite. This book claims to help students understand the technical details of poetry that tend to trip them up, in a way that is accessible, with plenty of examples from existing poetry. It's definitely academic, but it also looks like it will be both interesting and useful. I hope to pick up a copy of Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse by John Hollander some day.
And then I found Son of Laughter: A Novel by Frederick Buechner. I read a bit of it tonight and it was wonderful. It tells the story of Jacob the patriarch, with Jacob himself as narrator. The part I read described Laban's trickery as sort of an after-thought, an action he didn't mean to make until he made it. It told of Jacob's own machinations to cheat God, who he refers to as the Fear, out of his victory. It was vivid in the matter of only a few pages...
...and I think: This is why I can't be an academic. Because I want to read what I want to read, and it isn't all on one unified subject, and it won't wait until I'm finished studying whatever it is I think I want to study.
So what do you say to that?
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