The Read-a-Book Challenge.

Many people don’t read for pleasure. If you don’t, and if you want, you can challenge yourself to read a book. There were those challenges on the web. Dump ice on yourself. That kind of thing. They’ve mostly stopped, but you can always challenge yourself. You can get some ebooks for free on Project Gutenberg, among others, but those are mostly older books, in the public domain.

I don’t read that much. A handful of books, plus or minus, per year. You don’t have to be a super-reader or a non-reader. You can exist in the middle here with me, if you want. If you’re not familiar, some books are easier to read than others. You may have picked up a book and tried to read it, decided it wasn’t working, and thought you’d forgotten how to read. Like you’d opened a book written in a foreign language. If that’s the case, start with something nice and easy.

One of the reasons I don’t read more is it can be hard to find the books you want to read. You can read reviews, go with what’s popular, ask a librarian. In the end it will be you and the book, you staring at it, trying to make it go. Sometimes it won’t go. Do you admit defeat? Beaten by a book? Or do you move your eyes over each disgusting word, hoping to find some kind of mystical experience, like trying to meditate but being stuck with your own thoughts bouncing around when you’re supposed to be quieting your mind?

There is light fiction. The protagonist on his way to sell his mom’s cow when a stranger offers to trade him some magical beans. If all you want is something to read, to say you did it, that’s the way to go. And if you don’t read regularly, that’s the way to get into it. Find some easy modern detective story. Find a book for teens. Find a collection of short stories. Read a page a day. Build up a habit.

Non-fiction of all kinds. Reference books. The state of science in some field or other. If you like some field of science, or a sport, whatever your interest, picking up some broad-view book on it can be cool. Biography, if you wonder about someone from history or a celebrity. I haven’t tried much biography, just a few about authors, and in both cases they could be summarized as “drank too much, fucked too much.”

There are older books and newer books. The older ones have whole paragraphs and chapters that have fallen away in the newer ones. Newer books tend to be edited tighter. The older ones, you practically have to skip some of it, lest you fall into that staring contest trying to will yourself through.

There are audio books. I haven’t listened to a book in a long time, but I remember it being enjoyable. It’s not the same as reading, but if you have some stretches of your day that you can’t read, but you can listen, it’s not a bad idea. You won’t get the full reading experience, but you will imagine the action in your head. “The teacher snatched up the boy, who cried out with surprise, and carried him over to the nail in the wall where she hung him by his beltloop.” Paints a picture. Oh. For full effect, read that sentence aloud into a tape recorder, forget it, and play it back.

I like reading. But like most people, I like reading the books I like to read. Trying to read one that doesn’t click with you is no fun, is a chore and a bore. I think if more people want to read, and if the people complaining about not enough people wanting to read, it’s all down to getting the right books into the right hands.

As with the “Old Movies.” post, here’s a list of six books I liked (alphabetical by author):

1. J R by William Gaddis, 1975.

   A little hard to follow at times, but full of goodness.

2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961.

   Stands up as one of the top absurdist comedies I know of.

3. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, 2018.

   A little drama-heavy at times, but the straight science fiction parts were grand.

4. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, 1996.

   History by interviews, lots of interesting stories.

5. The Martian by Andy Weir, 2011.

   A fun survival science fiction book.

6. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, 1992.

   Another fun survival science fiction book.