Thirty-five or more years back I took a huge turn in my life which was quickly spiraling into a non-stop relationship with working long hours, fueled by the smooth oblivion of Old Man Daniels or just about anything that mixed well with Orange Crush.
I was schooled in the study of literature, wrote poetry, and contemplated the gradual diminishing of a mild case of surfer’s knobs. Then in Graduate School my fascination with Restoration drama was pushed aside by an exposure to the early use of computers in a research environment. Later I moved from academia to a more traditional business environment. In the 1960s the game was modeling or duplicating age-old manual processes on the new digital computers: it was fun and challenging.
Somewhere along the line I began to forget the literature—the drama, the poetry, even a occasional novel or two—and spend all my spare time learning computer languages and solving interesting problems with carefully written, elegant algorithms. Those times weren’t all bad and in fact were quite rewarding, but eventually it was wake, work, pass out … every day.
When I finally had enough, I discovered that football was a tedious waste of time, food tasted better when your speech wasn’t slurred, and there were so many novels and poems out there I felt I could never catch up.
They still keep coming.
Just this last month I suggested looking into these intriguing titles:
09-01-16 – Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America — Calvin Trillin
09-02-16 – Heroes of the Frontier — Dave Eggers
09-03-16 – Dark Matter — Blake Crouch
09-04-16 – The Crow Girl — Erik Axl Sund
09-05-16 – A Strangeness in My Mind: A Novel — Orhan Pamuk
09-06-16 – The Many — Wyl Menmuir
09-07-16 – This One Summer — Mariko Tamaki
09-08-16 – The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
09-09-16 – Forty Rooms — Olga Grushin
09-10-16 – A House Without Windows: A Novel — Nadia Hashimi
09-11-16 – Murphy — Samuel Beckett
09-12-16 – The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
09-13-16 – Border Town: A Novel — Shen Congwen
09-14-16 – Hystopia — David Means
09-15-16 – Do Not Say We Have Nothing — Madeleine Thien
09-16-16 – Inferno: A Poet’s Novel — Eileen Myles
09-17-16 – Last Days of New Paris — China Miéville
09-18-16 – M Train — Patti Smith
09-19-16 – Pieces of Soap: Essays — Stanley Elkin
09-20-16 – Before the Beast — Sasa Stanisic
09-21-16 – The Nix — Nathan Hill
09-22-16 – The Last Days of Night — Graham Moore
09-23-16 – Mischling — Affinity Konar
09-24-16 – Ark — Julian Tepper
09-25-16 – The Girl On the Train — Paula Hawkins
09-26-16 – Before We Visit the Goddess — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
09-27-16 – Dinner — César Aira
09-28-16 – The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden — Jonas Jonasson
09-29-16 – Princess Bari — Sok-yong Hwang
09-30-16 – Maigret and the Old Lady — Georges Simenon
A Celebration of Reading 