Hello all, this is Jared, Mandi’s husband, and father of her two beautiful children you have seen so many pictures of. Mandi is desperately trying to get her page count in this evening after a few days of disappointing reading numbers. So she has, for some reason, asked me to fill her shoes for the night and entertain her minions with my insightful literary knowledge and witty banter. Then we both burst out laughing at the absurdity of that previous comment and she told me to go and write a blog entry anyway. I will do my best not to bore you but I wanted to talk about my journey into the literary world via my wife and the used bookstore we used to own (sigh…) and how my appetite for books has changed over the years.
Where to begin? Well, I suppose at the beginning. In my opinion I have always had a pretty good appetite for books, something my mother instilled in me as a child, which never left as I grew older. Plus, lets face it, if you are a male between the ages of 15 and 30 and you have read more than one book a year, you would be ahead of roughly 95% of your fellow friends who are to engrossed with the latest version of Call of Duty or Halo to worry about reading a book. While I have never been an incredibly fast reader, or always had much free time to read, I never forget how enjoyable it is to curl up in a chair with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, and lose yourself in a good book.
Speaking of good books, that is the focus of this entry tonight; how my reading choices have changed in the past year and why. I am a guy, shocking to many of you I know, and in keeping with that fact I love to read books dealing with anything related to ships, shipwrecks, sailing, survival, whaling, war, exploration, conquest, battles, adventure, espionage, discovery, etc. I have read dozens of books on shipwrecks and whaling disasters and battles throughout history and without any outside forces acting on me I would more than likely have stayed in those genres until I died. Thankfully for me, I met my wife, the lover of classical literature and history and despiser of modern literature. Between being married to her for the past 3.5 years, and owning a used bookstore for three years, my literary tastes have changed considerably. Notice how I didn’t mention fiction in the list above. That’s because I hardly ever read fiction. Why waste time on character development when I could be captivated almost immediately with a larger than life survival tale? Well, Mandi’s love for fiction has won me over and I am beginning to sprinkle fiction into my normal reading rotation.
Speaking of reading rotation, I have forever changed the way I read and what I read. Before, like many people I assume, I would pick up a book that looked interesting (say one about the Founding Fathers), read it for a few weeks, slowly lose interest, pick up a new book about a shipwreck, love it, read it in a week, and loathe the fact that I still hadn’t finished the book about the Founding Fathers, and thus amass an impressive collection of partially read books. It frustrated me so much that I decided that something must be done.
I broke my reading into four categories: Religious Works, Personal Growth, Fiction, and Jared’s Favorites. I compiled a list of about four books in each category, to begin with, and must read the first book in each category before I am allowed to begin the second book in any other category. Thereby preventing myself from reading one fiction books, one religious work, and ten survival books. So, beginning two weeks ago, I put this new fangled reading list into action.
My current reading list looks like this:
Religious Works: Confessions by Augustine, Imitation of Christ by A’Kempis, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Personal Growth: Inquisition by Edward Peters, Future Men by Doug Wilson, The Prince by Machiavelli
Fiction: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Brave New World by Huxley, One Day in the Life of Ivan… by some Russian Author
Jared’s Favorites: Strong Men Armed (WW2), The Land That Never Was by David Sinclair, Aku Aku by Thor Heyerdahl
Etc…Etc…Etc…You get the idea. I am now reading fiction books I would never have chosen to read on my own, such as Jane Austen, and am reading books, such as Meditations or Inquisition, that will help make me a more well rounded person, but that would usually have gotten overshadowed by the books in Jared’s Favorites.
That should be enough for tonight. The lesson we should all take home is, expand your reading base and encourage others to do the same.
