Reading

Finished all the appendixes and am beginning the rewrites of the chapters. It is hard to know where to begin. I need to add more practices and a section on Documentation. I also want to add a rubric at the end of each chapter to help guide students and instructors to judge the quality of their work for the scenarios. There are descriptions that need to be clarified, expanded, or reduced. There are some sentences that need reworked for style. A lot to do, but my basic impulse is to skip it for now and read.

I have been on a reading binge of late. I reread American Gods by Neil Gaimen. I also have been reading Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, and inspired by it, I have reread Julius Ceasar and Hamlet. (They were the only two plays available in the Eatonville Library. I have the complete Shakespeare, but it is buried somewhere in a box in the garage like most of my books.) I am still reading The Logic of Hegel once in a while, along with perusing my most recent issue of Scientific American.

I really should be spending more time writing than reading, but old habits are hard to break. I have read many thousands of books. Despite that I am not one that believes that reading in and of itself is of all that great a value. It is not so much how much one reads that matters, as it is the quality of what one reads. Among those thousands of books I have read are many that are of questionable quality. Much of reading is a lot like watching TV--a more or less entertaining distraction from everyday concerns.

I have sometimes had the fantasy that I would like to unread all I have read, unlearn all that I have learned, return to a preliterate state where I could look at a page of writing and see not words, but patterns of black and white, shapes as mute as sunlight and shadow.