On Reading

I am an avid reader.

I use Feedly to manage posts related to my professional, personal, and sports interests. I typically go through these feeds after dinner. Those professionally related that I find to be of high quality I share on Twitter using Buffer to avoid posting several in an hour or so span.

While I do read non-fiction, I mostly enjoy reading fiction at night or on the weekend as an unplug and escape from real life.

I'm not an eBook reader or audio book listener. I like the feel of a book in my hands, the cover, the texture, and the weight.

It was my fortune that a friend left me two books. They are the oldest one's I own. The first is what we today call "Gulliver's Travels". The first edition was published in October of 1726. This is not the edition I have. I'm not sure what edition I have only that it was printed by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., No. 13 Astor Place, NY. No date is provided. I've not read this edition because the pages are delicate as is the binding.

The other was comprised of two volumes by Washington Irving, The Life of Columbus and A Tour of the Prairies. Again, I was unable to find a published date, only that the publisher was the Syndicate Trading Company, NY. Again, this volume has delicate pages and binding, so I keep it shelved and handle it little.

A third volume was given to my by my grandfather, and it was my great-grandfather's,  Our Western Border: One Hundred Years Ago by Charles McKnight. It states that it was added to the Library of Congress in 1876

I used to keep books to read and read in a spreadsheet, until I discovered Goodreads.

I love Goodreads and its app. You can search by title or author and read not only the publisher or author's take, but also get reviews from readers. 

I write reviews of all the books I read, I enjoy the exercise of thinking about what I've just read and articulating it in the review knowing others will read it and be able to comment on it. It is also very helpful when reading a series as a means to remind yourself what happened in the previous book or books.

In my home office, I've organized my favorites on seven shelves. Most everything else then goes to the closet (which I shelved and can hold another 150 or so books), once they are removed from the closet they go to the garage, where I have a few shelves, but most often these get donated.

My seven shelves feature: math/science, history/biography, religion, sports/art/music, and three shelves of fiction, one and a half or by or about J.R.R. Tolkien (I'll write a future post on that addiction at a later time).

The other fiction works include Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker Series, Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series, Dostoevsky's Demons and The Idiot, several books by John Barth, Hemmingway's short stories, multiple Joseph Conrad novels and a 'selected works' volume, 'complete' Shakespeare volume, Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, The Notebooks of DaVinci, and to round out the collection, Calvin & Hobbes, the Sunday Papers 1985 - 1995.