11
Followers
23
Following
Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
The Road
My friend, Michael, proclaimed Cormac McCarthy as being the most beautiful writer America has ever produced. Perhaps so. Michael is, after all, an English teacher, so he should know about this kind of stuff. I, on the other hand, was always labeled as an English retard in school: I only read at half the speed required to be a success in college, and my "essays" were returned with lots of bright, red "K"s marked all over them. A "K" meant the writing was clumsy. Ok, so it's clumsy, what do I do about it? Since I was an English retard, no one wasted their time telling me how to do better (well, except for my first love, Miss Garner, my 11th-grade teacher; she did make an effort to help). Good thing I found physical chemistry. By immersing myself in P. chem, I could avoid starvation despite my English-language disability. Anyway, this book, wasn't doing much for me and I gave up 10% of the way through. It seemed that intentionally artsy-fartsy writing was more important to this author than was any kind of compelling narrative. I have no idea what was going on because the author thought it more important to describe bleakness in the most imaginative and colorful ways, for endless page after endless page, than to describe what actually was the issue being addressed (perhaps some kind of post-apocalyptic, dystopian remnant of a world inhabited by at least one man and his boy companion). I'm done with McCarthy, which will only reinforce the belief that I'm an English retard. I'm old enough that, with luck, I'll be dead soon and this limitation of mine will no longer be of any consequence.
