Leafing Through the Pages

I've been working on a piece about my first year of retirement. In doing so, I took a look at my reading habits as well as my motivation to read more. Even I was a little surprised when I took a look at it at arms length. I mean that in a metaphysical way since it is well known that people my age can't see crap at arms length. I think this exercise speaks somewhat to the importance of goals ... intent and execution. Though goals may change at any time, from goals come results. Another day ... another path ... but here is what happened during the first year of my retirement.

Here’s some unsolicited retirement advice. Before you retire … get a Kindle.  I made a plan ... a plan to get smarter ... to get some culture ... to get literate. I had a plan. I actually got started on my reading plan a little before retirement. In a nutshell, I felt stupid because I never really read “the classics”. Who knows … maybe nobody ever read them! But I vowed to do so. And so, since I was retired, I could read whenever I wanted to. I said that I wanted to do this, but sometimes even I don’t believe me. To test my sincerity, I launched my new reading program with the likes of The Iliad, Dante’s Inferno and Jane Austen.  I did this to test my resolve. I read somewhere that Don Quixote as the greatest book ever written; so I chose it. Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, Tristam Shandy, The Age of Innocence, and Far From the Madding Crowd made my list. I read so much late 1800’s literature that I found myself inserting the terms “I shall” into my daily vocabulary.

I decided that poetry was a weakness in my literary education. That is another way of saying that I didn't’ read poetry and never would. To remedy the situation, I read an anthology of the World’s Greatest Poetry, and collections by T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow, Keatts, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, Coleridge, Giacomo Leopardi, and Robert Burns.  In the words of Burns, my passion for the page was like "... a read, read rose". (Forgive me for that. I couldn't stop myself). I read Whittier’s Anti-Slavery Poems, the Book of Negro Poetry, and Langston Hughes. I even signed up for a poem of the day on email.

I read the stories of the Arabian Nights, the sagas of Iceland, the epics of the Hindu religion, Tao Te Ching Taoism, Thoreau’s Walden, short stories of Edgar Alan Poe, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Conrad’s Nostromo and Heart of Darkness,  Dracula, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A dabbled in the world of detectives with works of Henning Mankill and the Swedish detective Kurt Wallender, Snowman – a story of a Norway detective, and even a little P. D. James. I just couldn't get enough!

All this I topped off with the ramblings of a teenage, self-professed drag queen who writes as Germain Alcala and my favorite author’s (Jeanette Winterson) newest memoir, Why Be Happy When you Can Be Normal.

And so it goes. Reading is an important aspect of my retirement. I take pride that I am a Reader.  Alas, "getting smarter"has prove to be somewhat more difficult than I imagined. Next year, perhaps, I shall focus on the " _____ For Dummies" genre.