onegoodmove

I started keeping a list of my reading in 1980. I forget what my motivation was. It is not a lifetime reading list I was already thirty-five when I began. It does however cover a considerable part of my life. Perhaps I'll get ambitious one day and include the pre 1980 stuff at least that I can remember. There was the Science Fiction stage where I read Heinlein, Asimov, and Herbert, you know "Stranger in a Strange Land", "The Foundation Trilogy", "Dune". Then came the Hermann Hesse years big while attending the University of Utah. Narcissus & Goldmund was my favorite. I also read a lot of Hemingway back then, is there anyone better, David Gagne apparently doesn't think so. And of course Steinbeck was also a popular author then as now. There was a weekend in 1967 when I read Tolkein's Ring Trilogy, and of course I have fond memories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Hundred Years of Solitude". I have told others of the joy I've found in keeping a list, a connection to my past, and many have started their own lists, and related a similar satisfaction. Perhaps like the marks on the wall measuring our growth as children a reading list measures our intellectual growth or perhaps the growth of our humanity. I think a list is a particularly good idea for young and new readers. I read both fiction and non-fiction though I prefer fiction it is more real. Carl Gustav Jung said "Man's estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual - that is the major cause of mental illness." Or simply put if you're not reading fiction you risk being a wacko. So pick up a book and read it. Then jot down the Title, Author, anything your heart desires. You'll be better for it.

Credit for the Jung quotation goes to Jonathon Delacour via Pierre Ryckmans