how do you decide what to read?

 When you're young it starts at the covers. Or someone reads to you and you only hear the voice and don't know anything about a book. 

At some point they cut you off and won't let you read to them. I remember when that happened to my boys. They would just play on their phones barely phased. Ruby will only let me read books she has chosen. No unauthorized reading. She knows what she wants. She is so like her mother. She will be a success, and the winds of the world will buffett her thisa say and thata way. Yessirrrreeee. That's the Flannery O'Connor coming out in me. She's amazing in her own way. I'm writing a blog on Wise Blood.

So then it's Hardy Boys and whatever the librarian thinks you might like, to help you make a decision, but the decision is still yours. The covers don't really convey the insides. It still felt like work for me.

My friend's sister was going to throw out a box of books. I reached in and grabbed Slaughterhouse Five. I read it by a lake in upstate Wisconsin. The great white north. Ya hoser. I loved the book. I've reread it every few years, though I'm slowing down, finding it less and less impressive. That is how you consume something that interests you. 

I reread The Sun Also Rises because I enjoy Paris between the wars, fishing in rural Spain, and running with the bulls. And why is jake ruined in his privates from the war? Was Hemingway's morbid imagination considering the what if of early life impotence.

Then I got into Paul Auster. Then Philip Roth. Then Octavia Butler. Ursula Le Guin. Then Haruki Murakami. Then I went into Shakespeare for a year and a half. Now I'm enjoying the complete works approach. You get to see the whole arc. I still need to read Henry James' last 3.

I also create lists, and save for later many books, so when I have a need. I read a lot of book reviews, and often put a book on a list after reading it. I have a document, many wish list, and piles of books that I haven't read. I can't have abibliophobia.

Then I learned about the library. It will send a book to the closest library, from all the libraries in Queens. They have an extensive collection. I can't tell you what a big fan I am of the library during the Trump Virus Quarantine. Their online collection was still available. They'd gotten rid of Kanopy and I was so angry about that. I almost fired off an angry letter. Nobody does that any more. I just paired my online collection down to the minimum. I've been passing up books I've longed to read for a long time. That is why I can't have abibliophobia. Too many unread books on my shelfs, too many groovy offerings from the library and with Guttenberg, there's just too much to read.

Right now Wise Blood is the be all end of my reading but what is next? I was thinking of finishing a half finished nk jemisin, I abandoned. The 2 books I have a both due by the end of September, but I have books being sent to the library.  I'm following my interests listed in this post. Trying to plan reading doesn't work because available books or sudden interests will collide, and you'll read off the plan.

FO'C's writing of Haze is amazing. I'd like to quote his philosophy of the Church with no Jesus. But when he says about pesky people who won't go away. "If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it'll hunt you down and kill you." Hunters think in the prey and the hunter mentality, they have a Star Trek about that, a hunter society that hunts other species. It's different than the warrior society of the Klingons. 

I think that's a key political insight hicks have. They want to hunt down instead of be hunted, which increasingly is how consumers in the materialistic world feel. Somehow they experience the most empowerment by being a Vote-Against-Your-Own-Interests-Republican. I think what the Trump era has exposed is that they'll say anything to get power. Power has no ideology, it's nihilistic, just get get get for my family because nothing I do is ever enough, daddy please don't go. They imagine they are unencumbered, but there's a level of deception in the politics that is unprecedented. He's talking of doing away with social security. He's throwing the election because he's tired of being expected to grow up, and being held accountable. It's really crazy, he's alienated a big Republican donor, yelling at him to more. Seems like self sabotage to me.

Flannery O'Connor has deep insight into the southern psyche. Worth reading is my pronouncement.