Um, I’m want­i­ng some­thing to read, and the libraries are being very slow about ful­fill­ing my hold requests, so I’m look­ing for old stuff that’s good and prob­a­bly on the library shelf just wait­ing to be loved. I think I might try some Jane Austen, as I recent­ly real­ized that I nev­er have, but the excerpts I’ve seen are wit­ti­er than I expect­ed. I’m not fond of romances or “chick lit” or such things, which is where I’ve place her books.¹

If I’m going to try them, where should I start? Any oth­er authors/books you think I should try?

I don’t care to read doom-filled, depress­ing sto­ries. There’s enough of that in the real world, and I can always go look at the news. I want to read about smart, like­able peo­ple doing inter­est­ing things while ban­ter­ing wit­ti­ly. Humor is impor­tant, but goofy slap­stick non­sense loos­es me. I HATE HATE HATE “do some­thing obvi­ous­ly stu­pid, try to get out of the result­ing mess” plots.

I’ve read Lois McMas­ter Bujold, thanks 🙂 Well, all the Vorkosi­gan uni­verse stuff, any­way. Her fan­ta­sy books have nev­er inter­est­ed me, for some odd rea­son.

Thank you 🙂

I remem­ber read­ing a book–no, a series–in the ear­ly 90s or so. The clear­est mem­o­ry I have is that there was some sort of drug that made any­one who took it “perfect”–healthy, beau­ti­ful, ath­let­ic, etc. It was also addic­tive after just one dose, and there was no way to get off it–to stop tak­ing it meant death. The main char­ac­ter’s wife was dosed with it so that the sup­pli­ers could con­trol the hero. I think the pro­tag­o­nist was white, and seem to recall that his wife was described as hav­ing an Afro.

Does that trig­ger any mem­o­ries for any­one?

You must read, Alice, before it’s too late. You must fill your mind with the invent­ed images of the past; the more the bet­ter. These images, apart from any­thing else, will help you put the two and twos of life togeth­er, and the more images your mind retains, the more won­der­ful will be the star-stud­ded canopy of expe­ri­ence beneath which you, poor prim­i­tive crea­ture that you are, will shel­ter; the near­er you will creep to the great blaz­ing bea­con of the Idea which ani­mates us all.
— Fay Wel­don, Let­ters to Alice: On First Read­ing Jane Austen

I read. I read a lot. I read while stand­ing in line any­where, while eat­ing (unless I have some­one to talk to, of course), any time my eyes aren’t required to do some­thing else. I almost always have sev­er­al books in progress and love the fact that I can car­ry an entire library in my hand now, thanks to ebooks! I don’t read as many peri­od­i­cals as I once did, but with blogs and such, I read more than ever!

I learned to read fair­ly ear­ly, thanks to my won­der­ful moth­er who read to me and my sib­lings (and my daugh­ter!). After find­ing me puz­zling over her old high school lit­er­a­ture book at age 6, try­ing to make sense of Beowulf, ¹ she began patient­ly cart­ing me back and forth to the library at least once a week. She encour­aged a love of the writ­ten word that drove me to improve my read­ing skills, and I cred­it any aca­d­e­m­ic (or oth­er) suc­cess to that skill more than any oth­er. Katie and I spent a lot of time read­ing togeth­er when she was younger, until she became a con­fi­dent read­er on her own. She’s an avid read­er now, and takes a book with her every­where just as I do.

Since the writ­ten word is so impor­tant to me, it’s only rea­son­able that I have parts of my site ded­i­cat­ed to it. I’ve list­ed most of the books (and music and movies) I own in a Read­er­ware data­base. I just can’t rec­om­mend that soft­ware high­ly enough! It can export a nice list of the books, which I keep intend­ing to upload here. If I were smarter, I’d fig­ure out how to make it work with GoodReads. Some­day! I’ve let go of many of my books (and CDs) over the last few years and moves, since I’ve switched almost entire­ly to dig­i­tal media any­way.

Because I read almost all ebooks now, Cal­i­bre is vital to man­ag­ing my book col­lec­tion. It runs on Mac, PC, and Lin­ux box­en.

• GoodReads — what I’m read­ing now, what I’ve read recent­ly (with some reviews, or at least rat­ings!), and the huge list of books that I’m plan­ning to read. Some of that is spread over my oth­er sites, so this one just has fic­tion, poet­ry, and non-tech­ni­cal/busi­ness non-fic­tion.
• Stuff to read — Books and authors. This will even­tu­al­ly get inte­grat­ed with Now Read­ing.
• I’m so fond of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy that those books and authors need­ed their own sec­tion.
• Books for chil­dren of all ages
• Harold Bloom on the West­ern Canon Jr.
• Sites for read­ers — reviews, book­sellers and so on. Soon to be updat­ed to include pod­casts!
• Places for Atlanta read­ers — libraries and book­stores
• Some of my own writ­ing. These are most­ly tech­ni­cal arti­cles, cho­sen for my pro­fes­sion­al port­fo­lio.

I used to write a lot of poet­ry and short sto­ries, but most of that has been lost to time. If any­one out there has any fic­tion or poet­ry that I shared with you at some time, I’d real­ly appre­ci­ate a copy.

There are a few authors who I love so much that I’ve made pages with sam­ples of their poet­ry. I post pieces by oth­er poets from time to time in my blog here. There are also a fair num­ber of poet­ry posts in my Live­Jour­nal that haven’t been post­ed here (yet).

• Maya Angelou
• Madeleine L’En­gle
• Leslea New­man

Final­ly, these are some pieces I find inspi­ra­tional.

• 25 Lessons for Life by Mar­i­on Wright Edel­man
• The Desider­a­ta by Max Ehrmann
• Remem­ber by Richard S. Gilbert
• Invo­ca­tion by Ingrid Shafer for the Okla­homa Acad­e­my of Sci­ence
• Our Deep­est Fear by Mar­i­anne Williamson