That’s a year in a tweet right there. The top 10 headlines of year, compiled by Time on the 12th of December–before Sandy Hook, before the NRA press conference, before the tweet–are no picnic either. Somehow, my book choices knew the zeitgeist of 2012 before it zeited,
Just out of curiousity, do you ever read fiction? Something light and breezy just for kicks? Your reading list looks a lot like homework. Or perhaps we just have different ideas regarding what constitutes light reading?
We probably want different things. I am a Myers Briggs* ENTJ–either doing some productive, sleeping, or hovering dangerously between the two–so my problem is what does light reading get me? And to feed my “E”, what does it get me that is social? If I read a light career or self-improvement book, it is because I want to be a certain kind of person and then I interact around that book with other people who want to be that way. But I’ve learned through torturous book club attempts that if someone else happened to read the same murder mystery I read, that doesn’t give me any information about whether I want to talk to them about anything.
There’s also the issue that if I do read a fiction book I’m not likely to write much about it because I’m bad at writing about fiction. Though you should try the Bangkok 8 series- it is very engaging!
*Here’s a free Myers Briggs type test for anyone who is interested: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
Where to begin… In my experience, reading fiction has opened me up to things I may not have otherwise known I enjoyed. I “discovered” Van Gogh because I read “Lust for Life”. I found an interest in the American pioneer movement because my kindergarten teacher introduced me to Laura Ingalls Wilder books – and I followed it up by reading many others, including Willa Cather. Fiction gives me fascinating insight into human nature. Reading Louisa May Alcott’s tabloid stories, would you ever have imagined she could also author “Little Women”? A 10th grade class in World Literature helped me understand the ways culture can impact outlook. When I read “Girl With A Dragon Tattoo”, I recognized an undertone I sensed long ago reading Russian folk tales. A book I have long forgotten the title of by an Egyptian author helped me to better understand the conflict in the Middle East. I could have learned those things from non-fiction, but I would have quit from
boredom long before
I finished a dry
recounting of facts
and statistics about those same topics. And that doesn’t begin
to address the ways
reading fiction (or at
least good fiction) brings you into character’s worlds. It reminds me that hardly anyone enters the world with the same outlook and vision – even if our background and experiences seem virtually identical.
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