Even at home, I read different things in different places, and in different ways. In bed, especially late at night, I read on my iPad so don’t disturb my wife. I keep many books there, as well as Amazon samples that I read in order to decide which books to acquire, usually from the public library, and usually electronically. After the children are asleep, I go upstairs to my armchair (I built it) in the living room and, by the light of a floor lamp I made, I read 20 pages or so of an ink-on-paper book, often with a snack. If I have to mind the children in the downstairs family room or, in good weather, out in the back yard, perhaps even on my hammock (I built it), I have another ink-on-paper book there. When the weather permits it, I read yet another book out on the upstairs back balcony.
At the time of this writing, the book on the balcony is Gogol, Collected Stories; the one in the upstairs living room is The Good Rain, by Timothy Egan; the one on my iPad is Land, by Simon Winchester; and the one downstairs is Shakespeare’s Collected Poems – about which more in another blog soon. The three ink-on-paper books are from the large stock of books in our home library. Most of them belong to my wife or me, but it happens the Gogol belongs to our youngest daughter.
After many years of reading only non-fiction (for whatever reason or lack of conscious reason), I have – sparingly – again taken up fiction. A novel or two in German by Walter Kempowski attracted me a year or so ago. After I read, recently, The Second World Wars (yes, WarS), by Victor Davis Hanson, I found, with some difficulty, The Cruel Sea (1953) by Nicholas Monsarrat. Hanson had written that, while WWII had produced Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, the battle between Allied convoys and U-Boots could not have yielded a similar Tales of the North Atlantic, but that there was the fine novel The Cruel Sea. After I finished it I cautiously resolved to continue reading fiction, with preference to the classic rather than the quotidian. That has always been my inclination. When I was much younger I felt that I should first master, or at least gain some command, of the older literature – up to, say, the 1920, with exceptions for Orwell and – to my mind different from 1984 – science fiction. Fifty or more years later, as my life has gotten much longer and thus is getting progressively shorter, I can’t risk losing time to reading works of not clearly proven worth.
Oh, yes, I forgot. I spend maybe an hour a day reading to the children in the house. I hate the Octonauts and Pokémon, and almost hate the post-Seuss Cat in the Hat books. Others I like reasonably well, some very well. But a year or so ago I started reading classics from my own childhood to the older boy (currently 8): Osborne’s The First Lake Dwellers, The First Bow and Arrow, and The First Wheel (but not his The First Puppy, since we are not yet ready for another dog in the household). Turns out Osborned was an interesting fellow: not only writer but composer and trumpeter player in a major orchestra. I also replaced some missing classics of my childhood with new copies of Treasure Island (but still with the wonderful Wyeth illustrations), and a double edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, this time not with the ordinary pictures of my childhood books, but with the Norman Rockwell art. The boy is OK with Tom Sawyer, but not yet ready for the more complex themes of HF. As for the controversial language – he will hear that word soon enough in the music around him, and then we’ll take it from there.
And now that I think of it, of course the Bible. But for me that goes without saying, as it once did for everyone. Sometimes iPad, sometimes this or that interesting translation, but most often KJV – and for several years recently, when I was writing my book about Bach’s German – very intensively, with excursions beyond English and German into Latin, Greek and – limpingly – Hebrew.