What books do I want to read?
ALL OF THEM. Growing up, it was star trek novels. Oh how I devoured those. Dozens of them. And going back a little earlier than that, it was the Hardy Boys.
Guys, I’ve been me since I was, like, nine or ten. I haven’t changed. I first read the Hardy Boys around then, and in the front of those books, the original blue ones from the 50s, they had the list of all the other books. They were numbered, even. And after reading that first one, maybe the second, I resolved to myself that I’d read every single one of them. I think there were…70 of them? Hold I’ll look it up…
58. Fifty-eight books. And I was like: I am reading every single one of these, I will not stop until I do so. And I was ten. Or maybe I decided that when I was eleven. I don’t remember. But I do remember reading every single one of them. I was lucky in that the library we moved to in Ferndale had all of them displayed all in a row, all those blue spines with their numbers on them. Most of them were the original printings, too.
I looked the series up one day, and found a whole write-up on the guy who created the series—several series, in fact, including (obviously) Nancy Drew and many others—and how the publishing company he ran had all these rules about how to write books in a series, and every chapter needed to end in a cliffhanger, and how you never killed any of the main characters, and you’d always refer to other cases and set up the next one…fascinating stuff. I should look it up again one of these days. There was pushback in those days on that kind of writing, that it rotted your brain, and he was criticized in particular. Any successful pulp writer is, I suppose, even today to a lesser extent.
These days? I have a list of SciFi classics I’ve never read that I want to. And my project right now for my writing skills is to read all of these shakespeare plays, which I just finished one today, my second. Henry VI Part II. Part 3 is up next, started it already in fact. I read them through once very slowly, looking up everything that doesn’t make sense, or re-reading any given piece of rhetoric over and over until I grasp it—not 100% on that one, but I do what I can—and then I go and watch a performance of the play, preferably live since those are more likely to be unabridged and in its purest form, and then, finally, I go back and read it through again a final time, which so far has yielded by far the most comprehensive understanding of those plays I’ve encountered to this date.
I’ve read a lot of shakespeare. I trained in it during theatre school. I was part of a professional shakespeare company here in LA for a time. A couple of them, actually, now that I think about it. But…it was always a role in that sense. I was an actor studying a part. I didn’t look nearly so hard at the play as a whole, dissecting the language in terms of how it was written. Or, in school, it was a sampling of plays during the course of a semester where we were reading a dozen other plays, or two dozen. This time…it’s working. I feel like I’m actually getting a real handle on him, and I’m only two plays in.
So, there you have it. I’m reading Shakespeare just like I read the Hardy Boys: in totality. One at a time. Those are the books I want to read at the moment. And there’s a long list to go after that, especially in the craft sense.
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Got up on time. Writing was good! My first good day since getting back. Whew. Same with the evening session, though I was more distractible then, for sure. We finished season 1 of severance. Joy needed her anal gland expressed—I did the deed whilst Liz washed her afterwards. Took a nap before lunch which was just what I needed; finished out the day with no issues from that. Work was good. Have a new project to work on, so that’s good.
All is well.
Night night.