What Did I Really Read and What Did I Read Since and What Do I Read Today?

There is no frigate like a book, said Emily Dickinson.

Anther simile for readers is a foraging ant, incessant, with multiple false starts.

A more apt simile might be as a free citizen in the city of books.

In Plato's philosophy, free citizens live in a city. They have leisure to pursue activities that are ends in themselves, not means to other ends.

Plato became somewhat cynical about life in the polis and the ability of the philosopher to improve the city. He spoke of the city that lies within, and the duty of the individual to cultivate herself within that city, living by eternal laws of the soul.

For me reading typically is a very private activity and marked most especially by the freedom by which I choose what I read. I may (1) select and never read a book, (2) read a portion and discard, (3) read entirely but not be much impressed, or (4) read entirely and mark as a significant experience in my life. Most of the books listed in boomerfrigates  would fit categories 1,2 or 3 for me.

The casual freedom we express in selecting books is similar to what others show in their taste and time spent with film and music. I too enjoy these forms, but do not have the compulsiveness I do with reading books. There’s no need to explore the comparative impact of the three, but reading books obviously has much impact on the psyche, if for no other reason than reading a 200- or 400- page book requires more synaptic activity than watching a film or listening to a recording.

This listing is a sort of autobiography of books I've read that have left a category 4 imprint.

Casa View Drug Store [I grew up in a booming post WWII suburb of modest brick houses built on prairies lying at the edge of Dallas, TX. Several times a week while in elementary and junior high, I biked to nearby shopping centers. My standard route included checking out the newsstand at Casa View Drug Store. To the left were racks containing perhaps 100 mass market paperbacks. In the middle was the magazine rack where I looked for the latest Hot Rod and Mad magazines. But on a bottom shelf to the right was a small selection of paperbacks, not newly in print, of some literary value, e.g., Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. I'm not sure why they kept that little space for these books--were they keeping them for students with school assignments (unlikely) or did the buyer or distributor maintain a small selection for the store's serious literary customers? (even more unlikely).]

Catcher in the Rye

Black Like Me

Lord of the Flies

1984 and Animal Farm

A Separate Peace

The Ugly American

Death Be Not Proud

Hot Rod and Car Craft magazines

Mad

Biography of New Orleans Marie La Veau

Casa View Library [We did not have a public library in my area until I was a teenager. Before that, my mom would take me on occasion to the library Bookmobile, which would make weekly visits to a nearby shopping center.]

Juvenile mysteries

William Saroyan

Religion and philosophy

Cartoons by Jules Feiffer

Steve Allen [introduced me to the idea of agnosticism]

Lad a Dog

White Fang, Jack London

Wildlife Photographer

Hot Rod and Street Rod

Dallas newspapers [My mom proudly says I was reading the newspaper cover to cover at six years of age]

Best seller list

Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Couples

Playboy [My dad had a subscription in the Sixties--not unusual as it was one of the highest circulation magazines in the country at the time. Here's a page from the Playboy philosophy. I cannot overrate Hefner's influence on adolescent boys of my generation, with his veneer of intellect within what's finally a sleazebag publication from a sleazebag mind.]

Pornography and the Law [My dad also had a somewhat secretive interest in reading the emerging porn distributed by the major publishing houses during the Sixties.]

Frank Harris

Fannie Hill

Hardy Boys [my brother was into these and I read most of the series]

[While I did read many of the books listed in this site as a young person, the books that stand out most were in the areas of psychology and philosophy. I was fortunate to move into adulthood as a reader when psychoanalysis was still the king. I read deeply books with a psychoanalytic bent such as Erich Fromm  (When I was about 19, I repeatedly read the Art of Loving, incessantly underlining),  Eric Berne and Erik Erikson. Normative/humanistic psychology also was developing and I also was  much impressed with the idea of peak experiences and healthful psychology presented by Maslow. Of course, another strain was the varieties of religious experience and expansion of consciousness as described by Huxley and Leary, streaming into Alan Watt's popularization of eastern approaches. Leary et al had serious content for a young person to cut his teeth on. Since my early twenties, I've stayed away from self-help books and popular psychology like the plague, but I account much of my saneness and general mental health to intensive study at a young age of the writings of some very sane and mentally healthy individuals like Fromm, Berne and Erikson.]

RD Laing

Thomas Szasz

Culture of Narcissism [came later but continued the psychoanaltytic orientation]

Erikson and Maslow

Sartre

Abnormal psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience, Center of the Cyclone

Alan Watts, The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Hesse, Siddartha, Demian, Steppenwolf

Norman O. Brown [polymorphous perversity]

Social/political blather like Greening of America

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Richard Baldwin

In Cold Blood

Immersion in a Masters in English

[In my mid-twenties, I acted upon a small, private inadequacy. Among my newspaper reporter colleagues, I did not feel I had the level of literary education some had. I had not read Hemingway. So I began a postgraduate education in English, earning about 60 hours, a masters and progress toward a doctorate.]

New York Times Book Review

Shakespeare

From coursework: Multicultural Teaching, American Literature (Whitman), Grammar, Old English, Victorian poetry, novel, creative writing, rhetoric and teaching composition, semantics, community college, world history, written comprehensive, Greek literature

Intellectual study questions of the period: How do people really write? Religious experience vs. insanity?

Novelists I began reading during this period:

Saul Bellow

John Updike [I have read nearly all his novels. I love him, especially when he writes lyrically about feeling good, as he does on occasion in the Rabbit books.]

C.L. Smith

Cheever

Joseph Heller

Ken Kesey

Another Immersion in College Study

[In my early thirties, I enrolled in a doctoral program in adult/continuing education. I read broadly in the area of education, but focused my dissertation on a somewhat esoteric topic: Ideas About Adult Learning in Fifth and Fourth Century B.C. Athens. This topic allowed me to read hundreds of books on Greek history and philosophy as well as critical theory and hermeneutics and the "Great Books" movement. Here's a brief summary of the dissertation content.

[A follow-up application of my dissertation research was a three-year period to facilitating an Adult Great Books Discussion Groups, using books published by the Great Books Foundation. Much collateral reading occurred on books about this topic: Alan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, as well as the selections themselves and critical reading each week about them. http://www.greatbooks.org/]

Intellectual study questions of the period: Problem of authority

Since my mid-thirties, I've been a huge collector of spoken arts recordings--mostly poetry, novels and The Teaching College tapes. These were needed to endure the many hours I have spent commuting to work. 

Through these audiotape acquisitions, reading T.S. Eliot became a preoccupation. I've listened repeatedly to Faulkner's spoken arts tape, especially his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Also I've listened extensively to Caedmon's modern poets recordings. Another series I've collected in recent years is The Voice of the Poet series by Random House and PBS's Voices and Visions. My current agenda is listening through the Romantic Poets audio tapes available at used bookstores locally as overstock.

Holocaust

Through my forties, I collected and read several hundred books on the Holocaust. This is a depressing subject, and my preoccupation with this literature was not accidentally related to the fact that my wife and I during this period were trying to raise four children through adolescence and college. I could hardly pity myself when immersed in the sad lives of Holocaust victims. If you also are a Holocaust reader, check out my Intro to Holocaust Reading and Holocaust Bibliography.]

Last Five Years

Shakespeare [Emerging from my Holocaust years, I was impressed with the movie Shakespeare in Love and Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare. So began a rereading of Shakespeare and his critics but also a collecting expedition for all the video and audio tapes available of Shakespeare's works.]

Maya Angelou

Toni Morrison [her readings of her novels are excellent and provided many hours of commuting enjoyment]

Salinger [At 14 and 15, I was consumed by Catcher in the Rye. Ten years later, I later found it a bit embarrassing, but Salinger more than any writer opened me to the power of reading to make new connections to people and ideas. I chose to reread all of Salinger several years ago and do not regret it.]

Kerouac [what sweetness and lyricism!]

Sexton [I love her gravelly, smoker's voice. With Kerouac, I began a practice of reading a biography or two on the writer/poet, and perhaps other memoirs. These help me to understand the writer's/poet's work and also sometimes are more interesting to me than the works themselves.] 

Robert Lowell

Robert Frost

Thomas Wolfe

Hart Crane

John Berryman

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And recent reading of novelists/writers

Michael Chabon

Richard Russo

Jeffrey Eugenides

J.M. Coetze

Ian McEwan

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzberg, Journey Into the Whirlwind

Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child