Reading Schedule

If anything Covid-19 has left me reading time, screen, paper.  It doesn't matter.  Words strung together into ideas.  A lot of them.

Each six months I set a minimum: one fiction, one non-fiction, one Jewish.  These in turn are distributed among an ebook, an audio book and a traditional book.  Audio literature has been difficult, the structure of sentences by a master is better visualized than heard.  I prefer my ebooks that way.  And classic ebooks beyond copywrite are usually free, so I've gotten to reading stuff my teachers would have wanted me to read to expand my mind.  And for the most part they did.  I just finished Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Despite it being on the 100 top novels in the English language, I found it ponderous, with about the same lack of fondness I had for his Heart of Darkness which was required college English course reading.  Still, completing something I really don't want to do has emerged for me in my later years an element of character, so I timed 18 minute blocks on my smart phone and did one or two a day.  Typical chapters took less time than that, but there were 45 chapters.  Stuff like this, or Bible reading for that matter, is generally enhanced with a teacher, much like writing is much improved with an editor, but some things you just have to do the best you can alone.  Got to the end, read a wiki summary on the book, which exposed quite a lot I did not grasp on my own, which it is a long way short of my own 100 top reading preferences, but there was a sense of having accomplished something worth the effort that illustrated my tenacity more than it advanced my intellect.

My schedule still allows three months to read two traditional non-fiction works.  I've selected two best sellers of yore, Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand and I'm OK-You're OK, a description of the psychiatry of transactional analysis on the not really missed heap of medical history by Thomas Harris.  Chosen more by their place in my bookcase on browsing than any real interest in either the explanation of gender linguistics or psychotherapy of old.  Best sellers tend to be easy to read, though rarely as elegant as the classics of literature.  Should be able to read these two alternating between them from session to session, much like I would have read one book on linguistics and one on psychology taking them as separate courses in the same semester.  And their presence in print means shabbos is not a delay in reading either.  Started each, written probably at early college level, simple prose, less engaging than I had hoped.  But the reading commitment is as much about tenacity as it is about intellect.  I will finish each within a month.