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Reading Life
Feb. 5th, 2018 04:28 pmI have picked back up Northrop Frye's "On Shakespeare". Regarding the flux in my routine, I am giving in to the urge to narrow in my reading life to the ultimate favorite books of my heart: the Shakespeare's and Magic Mountain and such. I am tempted to spend the rest of my days just reading and re-reading these, including exegetical texts that dig deeper into their mystery.
This mood struck at a bad time, though. I am still a couple of hundred pages from finishing Chernow's "Grant", and the thing is, it is a great book. I was absolutely loving it. Indeed, I was thinking that I might like it better than my Lincoln biographies and Foote's Civil War trilogy. One reason is because it goes into the Reconstruction period and the brutal terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, those dark episodes are very depressing, especially since I see its dynamic being played out with the Trump people today, and seeing how these dark forces might just keep winning.
So, I gave in to this need to come back home in my reading life to that small core of books that mean the most to me. However, I still intend to at least finish the Grant book. I'm going to give it a shot after the Frye book. But then it's back to reading as if it were my last week on earth, staying close to my true loves, at least until this mood passes, if it is just another mood.
This mood struck at a bad time, though. I am still a couple of hundred pages from finishing Chernow's "Grant", and the thing is, it is a great book. I was absolutely loving it. Indeed, I was thinking that I might like it better than my Lincoln biographies and Foote's Civil War trilogy. One reason is because it goes into the Reconstruction period and the brutal terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, those dark episodes are very depressing, especially since I see its dynamic being played out with the Trump people today, and seeing how these dark forces might just keep winning.
So, I gave in to this need to come back home in my reading life to that small core of books that mean the most to me. However, I still intend to at least finish the Grant book. I'm going to give it a shot after the Frye book. But then it's back to reading as if it were my last week on earth, staying close to my true loves, at least until this mood passes, if it is just another mood.
