Awash in Words

All I asked for this Christmas was books. Lots of them. Atlases, Flannery O’Conner novels, George Orwell musings, biographies of Teddy Roosevelt. My bed and bedside are covered in books. I love it. I hope you got exactly what you wanted as well.

The problem with receiving so many books is – where to begin? With the atlases? With the non-fiction?

That is my greatest difficulty with reading. I read to match my mood, not to finish the book. There are times that medieval history sounds like exactly the thing. But that mood usually doesn’t last long enough to finish Barbara Tuchman‘s study of the subject in one sitting. So it takes me a year of “Medieval History Moods” to get through it.

The same goes for long biographies. Sometimes I pound through three or four right after each other. Other times I have to come back to the same person’s story over the course of several months.

This doesn’t make much sense, I know, but it does explain the method behind the madness of the stacks of “in progress” books that surround my reading space. For me, books not only create a certain mood, they respond to the mood you bring as the reader to the experience.

Blogs do the same thing. On certain days, you might be ready to absorb the technical wisdom of Problogger or Copyblogger. On other days, you may need the lifecoaching of Zen Habits and the Happiness Project. I think that is what I like most about the blog world and the Internet in general – once you map it well enough, it can be what you want and what you need at any given time in your life or even your day.

Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Tagged as: biography, Blogging, blogs, books, reading, short stories of asia countries