“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen
― Jane Austen
So I think you should reread 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. I don't have anything clever to say about it. It was laying on the floor in our playroom and the kids were climbing on the ceiling so I thought I'd start at the beginning. It's just so very good. I'm 10 pages in and I can hear Scouts voice plainly explaining how it all went down.
Is there anything like a very good book?
Once when I was freshly married, I had friends come stay with us in our freshly painted one bedroom apartment in LA. It was real fun. But, at night, and we were all through with the day, I grabbed my book from my nightstand and dove in. One of my friends, who had known me all through high school and had never seen me with a book in my hand, asked me if I was just putting on a show for my new wife. I did like the idea, it would have been little 'Talented Mr Ripley' of me to present myself as a reader to my new wife and then three years in hold a book burning on our porch. But the fact is, I made it all the way through every grade of public school and never found my love of reading. It eluded me though, it seems like that's all I should have been looking for, but we never came together, Reading and I.
It was my friend Stacy, who offered to have a favorite book swap, when I was 22 years old. Luckily, I had stumbled on to 'The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe' a year earlier and loved it, or I literally would not have had a book to swap her.
She gave me, 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. She was right. I was shocked how this mandatory English 2 reading could also, inexplicably, be a good book. The thought had never crossed my mind. But as you know, a book requires you to be in the right place and mind to capture you.
My wife tried to read 'Cold Mountain' but never got into it, too cold and mountainous I suppose. Then, when she was recovering from surgery and had to be in bed for weeks, out of the blue the book reached out and pulled her in, deep into it's pages and held her there for hours. It's one of her favorites.
There is so much great entertainment out there. This is not one of those turn off your tv and read a book posts. But, if you are reading this and thinking that the last book you read was...'To Kill a Mockingbird' but in 8th grade, then at the very least, start there again. The world has changed since you were 15 and so have books.
The last book to really pull me all the way in was 'The Lonely Polygamist'. In the end I didn't really like it, but I loved the moment 15 minutes before my lunch break when I would remember that I had a good book in my bag and I was by myself for a whole hour and I got to read it. An exquisite feeling.
I am always ALWAYS looking for another good book... why, do you have one?
