Here's the situation: I read a book on reading and I go off searching for those books. Like Erasmus I have a difficulty deciding betweeen books and food. My family would much prefer that I go for the food, they like to eat. They like to read as well, but are more akin to going to the library than the bookstore. But if all went to the library to borrow a book rather than the bookstore to buy a book, how would authors be paid? Do library purchases count toward sellerdom (best and otherwise)? Perhaps we have a solemn duty to go and buy books in order to support publishers in the hopes of better and better books being made available to the buying public. I find I rattle on. Is this not allowed in a blog? Since blog is so close to bog this opens the way to enter the swamplands of verbal meanderings. I have meanadered from my first point, that of going after recommended readings. On my most immediate shelf I have several books on writing such as "Read like a Writer", "Chapter after Chapter", "ABC of Reading", "The Art of Writing Poetry" along with many others. Each of them has a recommended reading list. Add to that my own compilations of lists of books to read. I feel like I am always many books behind. Add to this the difficulty of which era to delve into. Ezra Pound suggests I go back to the Iliad in Homeric Greek. Koine I can handle. Homeric would be a new study all together. I could dismiss it out of hand as being totally impractical or I could look at is as a challenge. Could I do it, that is, do I have the mental and linguistic resourses to tackle such a project? Yes, given a pile of dictionaries, lectionaries, etc., I could make a go of it. Do I have the time for it? That is another question. Mr. Pound also suggests I delve into Chaucer, a more wholesome prospect for I do love Chaucer even though I have been remise in getting through the whole. Maybe a few bottles of mead and a roaring fire would lend to a fulsom and vigorous reading- aloud of course, not worrying if I got all the proper Middle English pronounciations correct. After that, more books tracing literature's past. Here then the frustration: I'm always going back to the beginning, like an undergrad.
I hope that in the above I don't sound like too much of a prig. Or intellectual effete. Though traces of that abound. The simple truth (can truth be simple?) is that I love to read, want to be well read, and am always playing catch-up. And I love to write. The two go hand in hand. I've chatted enough about my frustrations. Next time, perhaps certain joys and delights.