A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.
— George R.R. Martin
Category: reading
Not As Easy As You Think
This article … oh… blog … is dedicated to those of you out there who have been sprinkled with a little A.D.D. dust. You know who you are.
And if you have to ask yourself if you have been, you have been.
I’ve been trying to get more active in my old age, despite the roadblocks my body and psyche keep throwing up to stop me. I am tired of being tired, sleepy, and muddled. I’m talking to my doctor this week about some of my medications, working on the drug angle as well.
We went camping lasy weekend, just the two of us. Oh, and the stink butt dogs. It was to be a couple of days of doing absolutely nothing (except cook and clean up). We were going to walk the dogs, picnic like we were in the wine country of France, and read. We needed to relax. Both of us.
Sitting still in a chair near the woods in the sunshine (or shade) isn’t as easy as you’d think.
You start out relaxed. Feet stretched out, cold drink on the table next to you, maybe a small antipasto to carry you to lunch. The birds are singing away, kids laughing in the distance, a cool breeze tickling your hair. You’ve got a book you’ve been dying to read and/or dying to finish. All is well with the world.
For the first 10-15 minutes.
You find you are a little too hot or a little too cold. The sun has moved and it’s in your eyes. Or the shady spot you’ve found is suddenly filled with gnats or worse. You unconsciously start wiggling you RSL foot (or leg or legs) and suddenly you lose your place in your book. You notice the kids at the campground next door or four sites down never quit screaming while they’re playing.
You get back into your book. This is the part you’ve been wanting to read since winter. And you start wondering what your grandkids are doing today. Or your sister. Or your best friend.
You come back to the book. Yes! Take a drink of your beverage and the waterdrops on the outside of your glass drip onto your pages. You don’t want to get up just to get a wipe so you use the bottom of your shirt.
Your restless leg or your blinking from the bright sun threatens to take all of your attention. And now that mosquito bite from yesterday right above your ankle is starting to itch like crazy and the dogs are licking themselves with that unbearable sound.
You manage another page, still trying to enjoy paradise, when some weird bird starts screeching from the tree at the end of the campsite, and you wonder — is it a bird or is it a squirrel?
What is going on here? Why are you letting all these minor distractions distract you?
You’re getting antsy and over reactive for seemingly no reason. And the more you fight it, the worse it becomes. It could be a form of your A.D.D. that you don’t have, or it could be your younger side getting bored.
Modern day men and women have a hard time sitting still for any length of time. We always feel like we should be doing SOMETHING. Just ask TV commercials or social media. They constantly remind you that there are tons of things waiting for you back home, and they can help. You know: doing laundry, washing floors, stopping headaches, wiping up spills, picking out a new cell phone. A thousand other things you should be doing instead of kicking back doing NOTHING.
Well, it’s up to us to work through this distraction of distraction. We work hard, run thousand of errands, work jobs and take care of children and do the dishes every day! We deserve a break! A silent break!
Let’s make sure we take that break. For our sanity, for our soul, and for our creativity. After all… even God took a break on the seventh day, didn’t She? Making the Earth n’ all that stuff was a lot of hard work. She deserves some quiet time, too.
Find the Lady a book!
Another Try…all and Err…or
Here it is, actually Sunday night, and I’m feeling agitated/messed up/peaceful/chatty/thoughtful once again. I’m sure you’re all here somewhere with me.
I have been thinking about starting some kind of routine/ritual both in the morning before I get out of bed and in the evening before I go to sleep. Something to refocus me: something to guide me, relax me, teach me; something to give my mental chatter and A.D.D. a rest.
I’m not much for religion these days — I held onto a little bit of it through the years, just enough get me through, but I think most of it disappeared when I lost my son.
I’ve tossed around several Goddesses for a number of years, along with spirit guides (who helped me write my books) and guardian angels who watched my back. I’ve looked for faeries to light my way, along with miracles meant only for me and words that blow through the pine trees that only I could hear.
So perhaps it’s time to take a break from the airy fairy and try some actual, old fashioned therapy.
I’ve thought about reading poetry before I get up in the morning. Not necessarily the creations of friends and newfound poets, but the old-fashioned ones. Robert Frost and taking the road less travelled and Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Marilou Angelou. Beautiful, soulful poetry. Simple start-the-day poetry. No preaching; just musical words.
A beautiful way to start a day, don’t you think?
Then, when all the madness of the day is done, instead of wasting time online on Facebook or some other mindless rot, I have started going to bed, listening to soothing music, and reading a classic, physical book. Not an iPad book, not a magazine — a real live book.
I am beginning to think our grandparents and great grandparents had it right. No TikTok, no television series we have to catch up on, no blasting rock and roll or video games till midnight. I mean, all those are wonderful activities — but not when we need to sleep.
Life is full of love and play and intellectual stimulation. Full of highs and lows and frustrations and dead ends. But it’s also a gateway to wonderful worlds, wonderful thoughts. We just have to find a way to get to them.
It’s the calming of the mind that recharges us. The calming of the psyche. The calming of the soul. We can deal with anything during the day, but it’s the dawn and the twilight that really connects with our soul. Our center.
We need to find ways to reconnect.
If you have access to Amazon Music, there are a couple of music playlists that work well for me: Studying Music: Music to Study By, Relaxing Piano, Study Music, New Age Music, Meditation Music, Classical Piano, Calm Music Piano: Soothing, Relaxing, Soft Background Music for Sleep, Massage, and More, and Study Music: Soothing, Calm, Relaxing New Age Music and Classical Piano for Studying, Meditation, Yoga.
Most of the music is minor chord relaxation music — I hope it helps you relax and dream as well.
Let me know how YOU reconnect with yourself.
Faerie Paths — Saturday Afternoon
What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week. ~ C. S. Lewis
What Are You Reading These Days?
I am not sure what’s going on around here in my reading world.
I have slowly been accumulating e-books for my iPad/Kindle library. Not a bad thing in and of itself. But when I’ll ever have time to read them all I’ll never know. Although I prefer the feel of a book in my hands, many of these are expensive when purchased outright, so I’ve given in to the e-book versions.
Very few are the quick read romance sorts of books. And forget how-to’s. I don’t think I could get past instruction #3. The one’s I’ve been gathering are the classics.
The CLASSICS?
Yes — the ones many have heard of and few have read.
I don’t know if this is a chance to see what grandeur is all about before my generation’s writers become legend. But the scope of my choices are all in the past, all from past masters, and all for free.
I’ve downloaded a lot of H.P. Lovecraft — I love his vernacular. Even if I don’t understand some words. I’ve also been interested in Agatha Christie’s Henri Poirot’s adventures. I’ve thrown in books like the Count of Monte Cristo, The Great God Pan, Tales of Old Japan, and the Great Gatsby.
I feel like a kid in an ice cream shop who doesn’t know what to order so they order one scoop of each. 40 scoops later, I’m sitting looking at the bowl, wondering what the heck.
I do love reading. I’m not what one calls a voracious reader — I don’t spend hours snuggled in a chair with a book. I read at inopportune times — bed time, in the car. My A.D.D. prevents me from absorbing more than 20 or 30 pages at a time. And I have to find time between housework, writing, making Angel Tears, and my grandkids.
It’s a grand mess, but one I always look forward to jumping into. I think I selected these past works because they seem like time travel to me. Having someone write about shoguns or the Cthulhu or Mansfield Park takes me away to someplace other than here. It allows me to peek into the minds of those who came before me. In some cases, long before me.
I sometimes find myself reading two books at a time, for no singular story has so far been obsessive enough to make me pound through it. But I delight and dismay at all the books I’ve yet to peek into.
Maybe this will guarantee my living another 30 years to read them all.
What sorts of books do you read?
Sunday Evening Art Gallery Blog — Library Interiors
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
~~Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
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George Peabody Library, John Hopkins University
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Grand People’s Study House, North Korea
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The State Library of South Australia
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Royal Danish Library
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José Vasconcelos Library, Mexico
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Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland
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Royal Monastery Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain
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Admont Abbey Library, Austria
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Bibliotheque Nationale de France, France
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Salt Lake Public Library, Utah
A Friend’s Trip Through Alternate Reality
Reflections of altered states, altered lives, is what writing — and life — is all about. It’s how I feel when I read, how I feel when I write. And there are times when I wish I could stay in those altered states a bit longer…
Enjoy this post from fellow blogger Tom Rains..
We long for altered states in life. Is this a bad thing? Is sobriety, the unaltered state, more virtuous? Is it more rational? Is it more real? Or should we aim to exist in altered states as much as possible? It seems like everything we love in life is similar to a drug-induced experience. Sometimes, […]
Do You Cthulhu?
Most writers love reading as much as writing.
Most writers have less and less time to read if they want to more and more write.
But it is in reading that I see what fascinates people. What motivates people. What creativity hides inside of people.
Do you know what a Cthulhu is?
I really didn’t. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t know. There’s a lot of words in the world I don’t know. But I broke down last week and ordered the hardcover version of H.P. Lovecraft’s Greatest Hits. I’d always heard about his being one of the pioneers of horror and bizarre fantasy, but I figured it was time to find out for myself.
Now, for you readers, fantasy lovers, science fiction aficionados, you already know this word. But for those of us who never got around to reading many of the classics, this is a new word for us. For me.
There is a true style of richness in the writing of the beginning of the century — one that flows from the lips and mind onto the pages like melted chocolate. There is a decadence in their words that are lost to today’s publishers. Not that I harbor any negativity for modern literature — on the contrary, ~I~ am a modern writer. Language has changed; cadence, allusion, all fell under a different tree back in the early 1900s.
And that is why I read. To experience the same emotions written in the language of the time.
I don’t consider myself well read, although I have danced through quite a number of books in my lifetime. Novels, biographies, poetry, and short stories, from non-rhyming stanzas to staccato sentences to flowery where-is-this-going prose, I have enjoyed quite a bit of history through the eyes of other writers.
And that is why reading is so linked to writing.
When reading the flowing words of H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, it as if I have time traveled to other worlds, other minds. I am a fantasy/historical/ancient worlds kind of reader, so their prose is right up my alley. I also loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy long before it became a set of movies, and found entertainment in the depth of books such as Shogun by James Mitchell and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. They all create a world with their words, a world you can get lost in.
We all have our style — we all have our authors styles as well. Those who seem to be able to articulate better than we can. Someone who can describe a world, a situation, in one or two sentences (something I am eternally working on). How much description is too much? Too little? How do we make someone care about what’s going on? How far do we have to go to bring the reader into our world? Should I cut this sentence? This paragraph? This chapter?
There are as many styles as there are days of the week. Or month. Even though we tend to pick our own genres of writers, there are many styles to choose from. To explore. To listen to.
That is why those of us who write write. That is why those of you who tinker with writing tinker. It’s like learning to play the piano. The beginning is full of mistakes and run-on sentences and confused plots. But the more you practice, the better you get. And the better you feel.
According to Wikipedia, “Cthulhu is a cosmic entity created by writer H.P. Lovecraft and first introduced in the short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ published in 1928. Considered a Great Old One …. Lovecraft depicts Cthulhu as a gigantic entity worshiped by cultists. Cthulhu’s anatomy is described as part octopus, part man, and part dragon.”
Think of what you could write around that!
So write write write. And when time allows (even when it doesn’t), read read read.
H.P. Lovecraft and his fellow writers will thank you for it.
Know Any Spooky Books to Keep Me Awake At Night?
In the cold, crappy days of winter, I find myself wanting to be entertained while I’m stuck indoors.
TV gets old fast. I’ve limited favorite shows to all the Chicago’s (Fire, PD, Med), Face Off, and, if I can stomach it, Hell’s Kitchen. I’m also a fan of Grimm, which always opens doors to my other cold weather passion — reading.
I’m in the mood to read something spooky. Something heart-pounding. Something that keeps me up until midnight (like I need that). I have read a few of Stephen King’s earlier works (The Stand, The Shining, Carrie), and a couple of Dean Koontz. (I can not get through his Intensity; family and friends have all read it and praised it but it gives me the creeps.)
I always wonder why milquetoasts like me want to read something that nightmares are made of. I know I’m not alone — good scary movies and good scary books are talked about long after the mediocrity of other books has passed. And, like movies, not just blood and guts. Anyone can talk Dissection 101 and make is painful.
I look for books that creep me out without scarring me for life. Ones with twists and surprises and a satisfactory, if not super positive, ending. For being a writer, I know it is one’s imagination that needs to be taken care of first. If your scope is narrow, so is your experience of the world. If your imagination is fertile, your imagination takes wing. You can imagine things before you see them. Which is the basis of any good book. Things don’t have to be spelled out in black and white to be understood.
So the purpose of this little Tuesday night gathering is — do you have any books that fit the above criteria? Creepy, scary, adventurous, fun? Books that keep you awake at night?
Also — has anyone read H.P. Lovecraft’s works? I’ve been thinking of ordering them, as he was ahead of his time in his ideas and writing.
Like blogs, Twitter, and movies, I think recommendations from friends are far more enjoyable than those from an advertiser.
And maybe, through your suggestions, NONE of us will get much sleep.
Breezy Books Make Reading a Breeze!
I love a good book; I love good blogs and good company.
I seemed to have found all three at Breezy Books.
I also love free books, and that’s what Maddie Cochere is offering. And, from the sound of things, that’s just what I’m in need of.
In Maddie’s own words:
I’ve always loved the name Susan, so I chose to use it for my main character. I decided to write about some of my life experiences from working in a weight loss center by day and playing racquetball at night, but I would have everything play out in a much more interesting way in Susan’s life.
… I completed the fourth book in the series. I know! Isn’t that crazy? But I was having fun – sailing along, writing, laughing, and self-publishing. My books are a fun, easy read. There is mystery, a little humor (sometimes madcap), and a little romance. They are pretty squeaky clean with nothing to make you blush.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of blushing and shifting in my seat every other page. Sometimes I just want to read something fun, something real, something that feels more like me than the color grey.
I’ve downloaded my free books — and can’t wait to start reading. And the great thing is that there’s more to come.
Come check out the Susan Hunter Mysteries!
Humoring the Goddess 