I've read thousands, so I don't offer this recommendation idly. Don’t get me wrong. I love having free long distance, life-saving vaccines, streaming videos on Netflix, and access to Wikipedia. What I don’t love is how superficial and spare most of our literature has become. As wordy as the 19th century writers may have been, there’s something profoundly moving about their emotional restraint, observation of detail, and command of a language that has the richest vocabulary in the world: 171,476 words in English compared to its nearest competitor, Russian, which “only” has 150,000.
I appreciate fiction and have read my share of it, but for me reading has always been an endeavor to educate myself. My reading, as is true with my writing, is almost exclusively non-fiction. I don't fancy myself a spinner of tales, though I suspect I could do it if I were to put my nose to that particular grindstone. To my ADD brain, however, that sounds just this side of medieval torture. Plot? Narrative? Character development? Ick....
In 1994, I was in Zagreb, Croatia as the war in various parts of the former Yugoslavia were sputtering to a painful and bloody denouement. Next to my hotel, just off the city center's Ban Josip Jelačić Square, was a small English-language bookstore. These being the days prior to da Interwebz and ubiquitous email, Reddit, and social media, I needed something to distract me from the misery of war and death just a few miles away. Thus it was that I bought literally every Stephen King title the bookstore had. Sure, they were three times the price they would've been in the US, but I was grateful for the diversion.
I'd never read any of King's work prior my time in Croatia, but I instantly fell in love with his artistry and his ability to put his reader into the story. I felt as if I was IN the painting as it was being filled it with color, and it was amazing. I lost a LOT of sleep as I plowed through those books in my dank hotel room.
Say what you will about his twisted imagination- and it's every bit of that- but the man can paint word-pictures like few who've ever walked this Earth. If there's an Emperor God-King/Supreme Whatzit of the written word, it would be Stephen King.
What I particularly love about King is that he doesn't take himself terribly seriously. He knows that his skill, supreme as it may be, still leaves him inhabiting a very small box. Thankfully, he has an impressive sense of humor about it all.
I miss those days sometimes- minus the war, death, and the associated suffering, of course. At least it took my mind off the snipers and minefields.
I love what you wrote here. I always do. And the idea has suggested itself to my oh-so-suggestible mind that external problems (war, death, associated suffering) might be easier in some respects than the ones we create ourselves in our own heads and lives. In war, at least you know who the enemy is. In life, the enemy is often ourselves.
Naming my favorite author and book is no challenge whatsoever: Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality." (I got an earned Ph.D. on Whitehead's work, ffs, and have coauthored a book explaining why 90 yrs of scholarship mostly got it wrong.) It is also among the books I'm least likely to recommend to other people. For while it is the greatest piece of philosophical thinking in the 20th C., the greatest piece of speculative thought in some 200 years, and arguably the most important piece of metaphysical thinking in the entire Western canon (because the author was a real scientist as well as one of the leading mathematicians in England when he "retired" and came to Harvard to teach philosophy), the book is also easily one of the five most difficult texts in that same canon.
Whitehead's work is openly embraced by thinkers in India, China, and Japan, who also fully embrace the Eastern traditions from which they emerged, and in which still they live.
By the bye, anyone interested in Edith Wharton's work, but who struggles on a budget, Project Gutenberg has a long list of her publications, Including "Age of Innocence" and "Summer":
For anyone -- despite their best intentions, cultivation, and everything they ever learned in school -- who wants to know more about Alfred North Whitehead, there's an article at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all of whose articles are intended for non-specialists. (I know the author):
Dammit, Gary! Now I HAVE to read this thing about Whitehead. I can't NOT read it. I'm constitutionally incapable of not reading it. Because if someone as brilliant as you are is impressed with this guy, this guy must be pretty freaking impressive.
I appreciate fiction and have read my share of it, but for me reading has always been an endeavor to educate myself. My reading, as is true with my writing, is almost exclusively non-fiction. I don't fancy myself a spinner of tales, though I suspect I could do it if I were to put my nose to that particular grindstone. To my ADD brain, however, that sounds just this side of medieval torture. Plot? Narrative? Character development? Ick....
In 1994, I was in Zagreb, Croatia as the war in various parts of the former Yugoslavia were sputtering to a painful and bloody denouement. Next to my hotel, just off the city center's Ban Josip Jelačić Square, was a small English-language bookstore. These being the days prior to da Interwebz and ubiquitous email, Reddit, and social media, I needed something to distract me from the misery of war and death just a few miles away. Thus it was that I bought literally every Stephen King title the bookstore had. Sure, they were three times the price they would've been in the US, but I was grateful for the diversion.
I'd never read any of King's work prior my time in Croatia, but I instantly fell in love with his artistry and his ability to put his reader into the story. I felt as if I was IN the painting as it was being filled it with color, and it was amazing. I lost a LOT of sleep as I plowed through those books in my dank hotel room.
Say what you will about his twisted imagination- and it's every bit of that- but the man can paint word-pictures like few who've ever walked this Earth. If there's an Emperor God-King/Supreme Whatzit of the written word, it would be Stephen King.
What I particularly love about King is that he doesn't take himself terribly seriously. He knows that his skill, supreme as it may be, still leaves him inhabiting a very small box. Thankfully, he has an impressive sense of humor about it all.
I miss those days sometimes- minus the war, death, and the associated suffering, of course. At least it took my mind off the snipers and minefields.
I love what you wrote here. I always do. And the idea has suggested itself to my oh-so-suggestible mind that external problems (war, death, associated suffering) might be easier in some respects than the ones we create ourselves in our own heads and lives. In war, at least you know who the enemy is. In life, the enemy is often ourselves.
Naming my favorite author and book is no challenge whatsoever: Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality." (I got an earned Ph.D. on Whitehead's work, ffs, and have coauthored a book explaining why 90 yrs of scholarship mostly got it wrong.) It is also among the books I'm least likely to recommend to other people. For while it is the greatest piece of philosophical thinking in the 20th C., the greatest piece of speculative thought in some 200 years, and arguably the most important piece of metaphysical thinking in the entire Western canon (because the author was a real scientist as well as one of the leading mathematicians in England when he "retired" and came to Harvard to teach philosophy), the book is also easily one of the five most difficult texts in that same canon.
Whitehead's work is openly embraced by thinkers in India, China, and Japan, who also fully embrace the Eastern traditions from which they emerged, and in which still they live.
By the bye, anyone interested in Edith Wharton's work, but who struggles on a budget, Project Gutenberg has a long list of her publications, Including "Age of Innocence" and "Summer":
https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a104
For anyone -- despite their best intentions, cultivation, and everything they ever learned in school -- who wants to know more about Alfred North Whitehead, there's an article at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all of whose articles are intended for non-specialists. (I know the author):
https://iep.utm.edu/whitehed/
Dammit, Gary! Now I HAVE to read this thing about Whitehead. I can't NOT read it. I'm constitutionally incapable of not reading it. Because if someone as brilliant as you are is impressed with this guy, this guy must be pretty freaking impressive.
Several folks have spoken favorably of the IEP article. It's even been cited in the peer-reviewed literature.