Read with Me

 I heard an interview today on NPR with a woman who was talking about reading books. She said she reads a book a month, and suggests to others the goal of reading at least ten pages a day. At the end of a year that would amount to a couple of books a year. It sounds like a good idea, so I added to my New Years’ resolutions to read ten pages a day. 

 I have been reading at least 2 pages of a spiritual book at nighttime reading and another 2 pages of another book as bathroom reading. I have another book that I won in a contest about yoga on my nightstand.  I will be reading at least 6 pages of that book every day. Of course, I do a lot of reading online every day, yet there is something unique about losing oneself between the pages of a well told story. Great literature transports us to other places and times.

 It takes me back to my childhood when my life revolved around books. I read a book a week from age 8 to 18 when I graduated from high school. I named my beloved cat after a character in James Michener’s Hawaii, Wu Chou Ki, King of the Continents. I was there in Hugo’s Les Misérables with the French republicans storming the French Palace in 1830, as they overthrew the monarchy of King Charles. In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, I was in that barn with the poor migrant family, the Joads, who fled the dustbowl in depression era Oklahoma, when they found the boy who was starving, and Rose of Sharon fed him. That was a shocking yet illuminating   image for a naive 13-year-old girl. I was freezing with Lara as she shivered in the frigid Russian winter, saving the scarce firewood for when Zhivago came home. These books carried me off to other worlds and widened my horizons.

 Writers can be a beacon for society; good books can transport us out of our normal existences, can give us hope, and help us dream a better future for ourselves and for the world.

 Read with me. If you follow this blog, you can post a response to the blog. Please tell me what you are reading.  Happy reading!

Rivers I Have Known

New Year’s Day, 2023, seems like a good time to jumpstart my blog.  Previously, I chose to write on political and social justice topics. Starting this year, I want to focus more on personal topics. So here goes a simple blog…

 Today I finished reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which I have been reading for over 2 years, only a page or two a day. Twain fascinates me, although this isn’t my favorite book of his. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer I enjoyed much more. I read both of these works as a child, so I don’t recall many details from either. What I do remember is his humor, the strong characterizations, and vivid descriptions of the environment. Life on the Mississippi has humor, and both strong characters and vivid descriptions, yet it is disjointed.

 The first half of the book is about Twain’s apprenticeship as a steamboat captain before the Civil War. The second half chronicled a trip Twain took 50 years later on a steamboat from St. Louis to New Orleans. It would have worked better as two books. Twain’s best works, in my opinion, are his short stories, like” The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”. However, Tom Sawyer is quite well organized, mostly devoid of the diversions found in Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and his other novels.

 Anyway, Twain took me all along the Mississippi River so that I could see it through his eyes as living, breathing, ever changing, and the life blood of sailors, those who lived near the river, and those whose livelihoods depended on fishing, or carrying cargo up or down river. I went aboard The Delta Queen Steamboat, which was moored on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky in the summer after my high school graduation. Well, I don’t mean to write a book review.

 I am nostalgic for the days when rivers were more important, when rivers were not so polluted with factory and other waste. My next bathroom reading book is The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman. Might as well learn a bit about the main river in this area. I know that Cherokees used to race up and down this river before Buncombe County was settled by whites. It is too polluted now for fishing or canoe races, sadly.

 So it goes, as fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, would say. As a child in Shelby County, Indiana, I spent many hours on the banks of the Big Blue and Little Blue Rivers, Sugar Creek, and Flat Rock River, fishing with my dad. I knew those rivers. I miss them. Guess I will revisit Blue River in Charles Major’s Bears of Blue River, about life in my hometown around the turn of the 20th century.

 All these rivers to follow…Shall I take a dip in one? I can do that vicariously when I read, in my mind’s eye. So can anyone who reads.  Here’s to more reading in 2023.