What does "seriously well-read" mean to you?

Because I enjoy reading, I often watch various BookTube videos. The following is my response to: The Seriously Well-Read Tag (created by Randy Ray @LiterateTexan ). For the following, I'm mostly sticking to fiction -- my answers would be quite different if I dove into my non-fiction reading life. Also, while I do read some 'high-brow' literature, those considered the Classics, and what are often referred to as the Great Books -- I'd consider myself more of a low-brow reader when it comes to fiction. So, spoiler alert, many people would not consider me to be "seriously" well-read if they get all academic and "serious" about it! 

1) What book made you take reading seriously?

I’ve always taken reading seriously because it’s my nature but also the way I was raised. My dad was a lifelong reader and learner, always seeking more knowledge and ways to bring that into living a Good Life. Books were important from my first exposure to them when I was toddler and being read to by my parents; I was hooked on stories and wanted to read the ‘magic’ words myself. So there hasn’t been any particular book that performed that function.

2) What book did you pretend to understand? Be honest.

Can’t recall there being one for that. I’m not a college graduate or an academic or anything but consider myself intelligent, reflective, curious, discerning, and I enjoy language. If a story or book at some point leaves me feeling a bit lost, I usually pause or slow down, do some ‘close reading’ or even journaling (of which I’m a huge advocate and life-long journal-keeper).

3) Which three books are on your personal ‘required reading’ list?

This is a big question! And to try and narrow it down just three? Crazy! Also challenging to quickly separate ‘favorites’ from why I think they could be considered ‘required.’ My choices have certainly changed over the years and could easily change tomorrow or next year but … 

Since BookTube focuses mostly on fiction, I will answer to that up front. The first ones that come to mind are: A Tale of Two Cities; Gone With the Wind; and, hard to narrow it down, but maybe Lost Horizon. Honorable mentions, just to name a few more, are: The Thirteenth Tale, The Stand, Winter Solstice, The Gabriel Hounds, The Overstory, The Sparrow, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, Earth Abides, The Lace Reader, The Double Bind, The Wood Wife. Maybe in a later post I will go to each of these and describe how I understand their importance in this context — and perhaps clarify why I remember them so well. I’m sure many more will pop into my head the moment I post this.

Required reading for non-fiction: The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist; Becoming Animal by David Abram; and The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. And so many could be listed here that I’m not even going to go down that rabbit hole!

4) What author have you been avoiding? 

Not author really but book that immediately comes to mind is: Moby Dick by Melville. I’ve had an aversion to that book for decades, mostly because it’s about a man’s desire to seek vengeance against an animal. I admit that I may be giving it short-shrift and approaching it with the pre-judgment that I recommend others not do. So there. Thanks to this question, maybe I will make time to read this one. That said, being now in my elder years with only so much time left and a very long list of books I’d love to read — maybe not. 

5) What’s the hardest book you’ve ever finished? 

That would be the one that I’m still working on:  The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. I’m not sure I was call it “hard” to finish, just taking longer than expected; the writing is beautiful but it’s all narrative, quite lengthy, and is simply one I find myself reading ever so slowly — it’s not gripping like 20^th Century novels. It’s not lively like Dickens, for example. If I’m using the word ‘hard’ as in emotionally difficult, I still recall how upset I was in high school after reading the required book Watership Down. It’s another superbly written, excellent novel — no doubt about that — but because my own sensitivities lie in the abuses of humans upon nature and wild creatures, I’ve no interest in reading it again although I learned a lot from reading it the one time. This is also why I answered the way I did (below) in question #9 — I completely understand sensitivity to certain topics, but I still feel it vital to not pre-judge a book and to read it in the context in which it was written. I had no idea what was going to happen in Watership Down — this relates to one of my big problems with social media’s influence in our current culture. 

6) What’s a book that changed how you read? 

This is perhaps redundant, but that book might be A Tale of Two Cities. It was required reading in high school and showed me that a Classic could be enjoyable. I’ve been reading for more than six decades so definitely hard to pin down.

7) Quality vs. Quantity — would you rather read 100 good books in a year or 10 great books? 

I would choose 100 good books for the simple reason that I’m a constant reader, a daily reader, and retired, so to be limited to only 10 books in a year would feel like torture. I like to experience many, many worlds.

8) Which genre are you embarrassed to say you have not read? 

Not embarrassed. And since I’ve always read broadly, my biggest shortage would be not having read very many books in the Classics, something I’ve recently begun to rectify. I feel I’ve acquired adequate reading experience in the rest of the genres.

9) Which book do you think most people misread? 

These days, for fiction, that would be Gone With the Wind. Seems like many if not most people reading this book ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ within this absolutely fantastic American novel. I don’t agree with some of the aspects it reveals about human nature and our blindspots, however, like all historical novels, it’s a product of its time and that of its author.

Bonus: What does “seriously well-read” mean to you?

The answer depends on each person and what their intention is. I would first ask whether one wants to be an expert in one genre or one author? Or does one desire to be well-read on a broad spectrum? Does that include both fiction and non-fiction? For me, personally, when I think about this phrase “seriously well-read” I lean into having read broadly enough to glean at least bits of wisdom in all areas. Maybe not an expert in more than one or two topics or genres, but able to access understanding on some level across a broad scope of both fiction and non-fiction. If we want to be able to understand a broad swathe of human personality and culture, of philosophy and history, then I believe reading broadly is a good choice.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my answers to these great questions!

The Library of My Life Abbreviated

 Imagine if you will, a child learns to read by the time she is three or four years old. Her mother is later asked to remove her from kindergarten due to apparent boredom by arts and crafts that have little to do with written stories.

The same child is read to at night; not only is she read Bible stories but also mythologies from other cultures, from Greek to Native American (like Little Burnt Face), from Folk Tales to Fairy Tales. Nearly all of her early childhood Golden Books are eventually long gone, passed along by her mother to other children, but elementary school reports reveal that she nearly always placed high in the ‘most read books’ challenges. As she grows older, the girl reads fanciful tales like Wind in the Willows, but she also enjoys flipping through superhero comic books with her brothers. She reads her mom’s copy of Black Beauty along with Heidi. She is encouraged to read the complete 12-volume Audubon Nature Encyclopedia and that starts her passion for learning more about wildlife.

Gaining language proficiency, she reads her father’s science fiction and action/adventure novels, from Red Planet to Doc Savage to Tarzan. She enjoys reading Nancy Drew mysteries in junior high and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in high school, while continuing to read broadly in nearly every genre.

Her horizon continues to expand and she envisions her own tales happening within the woods on her grandparents’ farm, the giant redwoods on the West Coast, the majestic trails among the Rocky Mountains, the thick swamps of the southeast USA, the bubbling sulfur pots in Yellowstone, and so many more vacation landscapes that trigger her imagination. 

A romantic soul, she is captivated by novels that are often skewed towards a hero rescuing a damsel in one form or another, such as those written by the prolific Dame Barbara Cartland, as well as the popular Harlequins. A friend throughout her junior high years recalls the long line of books on this girl’s closet shelf, where during visits, the girls would often simply read together, each stretched out on a twin bed in a room decorated with white & gold furniture, pink carpet, and the soft comfort bestowed by many, many plush stuffed animals.

The girl becomes a woman and, eventually, her romantic vision collapses to a great degree due to personal experiences and, while continuing to read romance for ‘hope’, she also begins branching into an obsession for books in the horror and thriller genres, stories that are somehow reassuring to her for they depict, usually, defeat of the Monsters (human or otherwise) ‘out there.’ In her 20s and 30s, during the 1980s/90s, she was reading nearly everything published in those decades by Dean Koontz and Stephen King and others including the Kay Scarpetta thriller series. Another escape was reading in the fantasy genre, from series like The Dragonriders of Pern to the Shannara Chronicles. And, of course, there were a lot of books in the blended sci-fi/fantasy style.

During the crossover from the 1980s into the 1990s, she concurrently finds her saving grace in non-fiction books about dogs and wolves, nature’s wonders, cats, diverse landscapes as sacred, and woodlands. These mirror her own heart-healing experiences among these beings and, as she is called to care for them on a deeper level at the turn of the century, her library expands to include holistic and natural healing books, many of which show the mysteries of working with energy medicines. 

Emerging a bit eventually from the intensity of horror and thriller genres, she dives into the sub-genre of cozy mysteries, generally any of those that contain dogs and cats as prominent characters who support the protagonist, including The Cat Who series, the Mrs. Murphy series, and the Dog Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant. Along those same lines, she reads the mystery/adventure Amelia Peabody series and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series that takes place in National Parks throughout America.

In perfect synchronicity, the 1990s time frame also includes her initiation into Goddess/Women’s Spirituality, so large numbers of books on those topics and the hidden histories of women, often through the lens of psychology as written by women, begin to line the shelves of her library. Reading broadly across world religions, spiritual paths, from structured traditions to informal animism to deeply profound indigenous peoples and their life-ways.

As a Seeker, she senses that information is a stepping stone into knowledge that, hopefully, is transforming into an integrated wisdom within, just as her library mirrors an increasingly vast subject matter externally. Even during her non-fiction expansion into self-education, she continues to read across all fiction genres. An avid bibliophile, books are always nearby and reading occurs every single day, whether during her lunch breaks at work or between dinner and bed at night. Until around 2003, she had usually been a member of a library near where she worked so didn’t always purchase a book.

Books on different healing modalities turn her toward taking courses in those areas. Books on nearly every religion or spiritual path guide her toward a Wholeness of spirituality. Philosophical and ecological books deepen her knowledge of the natural physical world that surrounds us, all pointing to Gaia, our Mother Earth, within whom we all live and upon whom we depend.

The woman is now in mid-life. She begins to not only write (which has been on-going for years) but publish her own books, going beyond the diaries and journals she has maintained as a writing practice since childhood. These self-published volumes reveal where her heart goes, where her mind explores, feeling guided by Divinity to create and express herself through her beloved language of words. She writes poetic prose, poetry, memoir, and fiction, whatever wants to emerge at any given point in time. Always with the intention of healing and soul-growth for herself and readers.

And still her library grows, expands, evolves. She acquires some old books, a bit worn, from her father’s collection after he died; most were published prior to 1950, books he kept from his own reading journey. Surprisingly, she recalls reading some of them when she was a teenager — probably turned to when she couldn’t get to a library — and she’s reminded of this passion for story that she and her father shared.

Books on culture, social commentary, philosophy, history, a particular lineage and heritage accrue, weighing down already full shelves.  Sometimes double-layers are necessary because she refuses to box away her author-teachers.

Embracing her crone years, the library expands again into the Cosmos, into Death, into the Unseen who are part of our world, though most humans deny their existence. Her books now offer deeper more profound ideas on alchemy, the esoteric, magic — from the old masters to more recent ones — astrology, and divination. But newly acquired books also show her the worlds of cryptids, aliens, UFOs (currently referred to as UAPs), the paranormal, parallel universe theory and other dimensions of existence — all of which go in many different theoretical and experiential directions.

The now-elder woman continues to read widely and deeply and to write from her own inner world. Devotion to Sacred Study is a major focus. Her Library still morphing and growing into more than 3,500 volumes as her life dips into the second quarter of the 21^st Century. (See, also, my essay: "reading into a Good Life."

For a Reason

 Our society has structures and systems for a reason. A good reason. We have ALL benefited from these in the Western World. This doesn't mean we don't change these -- change is necessary -- but we must do it mindfully and do our best not to substitute one form of coercion, control, and/or dominance for the one we prefer.

As one web site sums it up using Chesteron's Fence:

"Chesterton’s Fence is a principle articulated by English writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton in his 1929 book, The Thing. The concept emphasizes the importance of understanding the purpose and reasoning behind existing systems, traditions, or rules before attempting to change or dismantle them."

This is really important these days. One simple example is that the highest crime rates are in areas where professional law enforcement has been denigrated and vastly reduced.

We might not agree on what changes to make, but we do have a system within which to work. And I'm all for civil activism as long as it's peaceful and doesn't physically interfere with people doing their jobs as established by greater society.

Countering the Coddling

This is the blog where I generally post more of a 'tough love' approach to life instead of soft-pedaling everything. This commentary can be a great kindness these days and isn't directed at a particular person or group but is rather my way of countering the coddling that I see on all sides of many issues.

Here's one issue. I began a while back unsubscribing to any YouTubers who moan, whinge, complain, etc., whether that's about their own lives, their health or lack thereof, or especially this weird public whining of "why doesn't anyone watch, subscribe, like, ya-da-ya-da, my channel." 

Regarding health issues -- physical or mental -- my approach after experiencing more than six decades in the world is that everyone either has had, is having, or will have health struggles, so that's just a 'given' and I see no reason to always be airing it in public. I'd rather simply send everyone prayers whether I know what they're going through or not. It's different if I'm sitting down or talking one-on-one with a friend or family member, but the public virtue-signaling? Unnecessary. 

As for 'being seen,' I mean, I get the emotions. It can be frustrating to spend time creating something and having the desire to feel appreciated for it. After all, I've written ten books (each one of which took more than a year, some even longer) and I'm completely unknown with small sales numbers. But here's the thing -- just because *I* love the work I've created doesn't mean that the majority of other people will. That's the real world and always has been, especially for writers, artists, and creative types.

I accepted that quite early in my creative writing work. Many of us aren't charismatic and/or not talented 'enough'. Sometimes we don't have the personality type or visual appeal should we try to self-promote. Perhaps our voices are irritating. Maybe we just never have or acquire that je ne sais quoi necessary for a broad appeal or our perspective is simply too odd for a lot of people. 

So, seriously, why the public pity-party? Do or don't do. Live your best life. You will be seen and appreciated by those you are meant to connect with. Your creativity will help those it is meant to.