Tag: reading

Biblical coincidence?

I’ve been reading from the Bible every night, in my effort to read the whole thing (Being raised Catholic, my family fit in well with the stereotype that Catholics really don’t read the Bible, but merely rely on hearing almost all of it through Mass attendance over the three-year plan the Catholic Church follows).

I’ve been in the part where Saul becomes King of the Israelites, and just last night hit the part where the Israelites seem like they’re about to have this big showdown with the Philistines… little did I recall that this upcoming showdown is actually where the story of David and Goliath takes place.

But I still haven’t read that part yet, so how have I come by this tiny enlightenment?

Checking my e-mail this morning, I found a digital audiobook from the library to be just this morning checked out to me (it had been on hold for quite some time, really [possibly months]).

And what book was this?

None other than David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell (if you don’t know his books, read them ASAP, or listen to the audiobooks, which are read by the author himself, ASAP)…., in the beginning of which, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the lead-in for the David and Goliath story, which, as I am listening, I suddenly recall, I have just been reading!

And so, with this fabulous Malcolm Gladwell approach to the story, I set myself with delight to the task of continuing on in my reading of the Bible.

I mean, what kind of perfect coincidence is that, anyway???

Today

Things about today:

  1. I finished another Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, and, naturally, feel like a total genius, totally inspired (as is the usual with his books).
  2. I cried multiple times and about various things, and I was okay with that.
  3. Someone told me that a someone is coming for me, sometime soon, within the next few years, and that that someone will love and respect and appreciate and value the beauty of a human being that I am and will show it in a way that I actually get to experience my immense value and beauty in the world.
  4. I want to believe him, and not other people, who say that perhaps I’ll never have a someone like that in my life (not in a negative way, but just a ‘there isn’t somebody for everybody, and you might be one of those everybodys with no somebody’ way).
  5. I was reminded that I desperately love languages, as well as teaching.
  6. I remembered, too, that I want to do more in my daily than just teach school classes.
  7. I wrote out all of this, before meditating/praying/playing music, and then going to sleep.

Post-a-day 2018

The voice of the story

We’ve been reading the book Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner in one of my classes.

As part of the research I have to do for it, I’ve been reading all about the intentional, semi-genius absurdity that is Mr. Faulkner’s sentence structure and story-telling in this book, and especially how details of the one big story come out from four different storytellers in all sorts of crazy order… always leaving the key details for the end, though they all knew these details from the very beginning.

Now, I read from a happy book every night before bed – a book that has me excited to snuggle up in bed to read it each night, anyway,if not always “happy”.

That book right now is The Voice on the Radio by Caroline B. Cooney, a book from a series I admired and loved as an elementary schooler.

The sort of irony of it is that, while I wasn’t really a fan of the Absalom reading and research originally, I finally got interested in it today with my findings on the style, as I was mentioning already…. and then tonight, reading my book, a conversation comes up in which a professor says how his wife keeps a chart by their radio – you see, the student is a radio talk guy for the campus station, and has been telling pieces of the story of a kidnapping (don’t worry, though, because the kidnapping got all sorted out, and everyone is safe from it all in the story now) all out of order and only in tidbits here and there – so that she can note whatever tidbit the student shares that night, and hopefully eventually piece together everything to understand the full story.

The student’s mental response to this comment from the professor is, “So his master plan was working,” and that “[t]he delivery of overlapping stories, out of order, had hooked the audience[…]” (quote from page 81 of the September 1998 printing)

… just like Mr. Faulkner’s Absalom style, I found myself thinking…

And so, I start to like this bit about Absalom, and, that same day, I find a strong connection to it in another book that I already like lots and lots… 😛

Kind of crazy, huh?

And I said ‘sort of irony’, because it’s kind of coincidence combined with irony – finding a connection to something I hated in something I love, except that I now actually like some of the former, so the irony is semi-replaced by coincidence…

Post-a-day 2018

What Hannah Found

I began reading last night a book that I had loved as a young girl… and I have found many similarities between myself and the main character…

Have I developed myself based on this character, though most of the details had long been forgotten, or did I originally like the book because I already related so much to the main character?

It kind of feels like I’m asking myself the deepest of psychological questions…

But it also feels like I’m asking myself a ‘chicken or the egg’ kind of question…

Post-a-day 2018

Not because it was hot

Why did I read the book Love in the Time of Cholera?

Because Sara, in the movie “Serendipity”, pulled it from her bag, and wrote her number in it, so that, after she sold it to a used book store the next day, Jonathan would have a chance of finding it and contacting her, if fate – serendipity – allowed it.

And her character in the film has always reminded me of the girl I want to be.

So, since she had it for some reason, likely to read it, I thought I’d have it and give it a read.

And I did.

And that isn’t the oddest of reasons I’ve read books, either.

(… just in case you were wondering…)

Post-a-day 2018

Eat up, dearest

“Ah, well, have your way if you must.  But he that fasts must attempt but little and stop early.  When shall you be back?”

A God-loving man once said that to Jeanne d’Arc (in French, of course), when she denied breakfast, because she was in such an excited and exhilarated hurry to get to the day’s task (of reclaiming the rest of the the river).

Sonething about it just struck me very strongly, and gave me an experience of delight.  I suppose it was the fact that it was someone who was Catholic giving such an idea, making it an odd sort of contradiction to modern practice in the religion.

Post-a-day 2018

Atlas Shrugged (and so do I)

Have you ever read it, Atlas Shrugged?  I am listening to the audiobook while driving, and I am finding it oddly wonderful.  Occasionally, I want to jot down sentence after sentence from it, and then just give up the idea, realizing that I might as well just tell people to read the whole book, because there are only five million quotes worth sharing from it.  Obviously, that is exaggerated.  However, I gave up bothering to write down anything from it, because before I can even pause the book to write down what I’d just heard, I’ve already heard something else, something additional, that I now also want to write down.  And that goes on for quite a while, such that I would be pausing the book far too much to be able to stay in the book.  So, I don’t copy any of them down, and I don’t even bother working on remembering them either, there are so many of them.  I just listen and absorb and enjoy and wonder.  I have no idea what this book is about.  I had ideas related to something from the era of Fahrenheit 451 and the other Orwell future-is-a-terrible-place sorts of novels, but I don’t know where I got the idea – I genuinely knew nothing but the title of the book before I began reading it just last week.

But I like it so far.  It has me ever on my toes, and the reader is wonderful with making everything seem important and worth hearing.  I feel like I’m in a spy novel of some sort, but, instead of its being about a murder of some sort, it is about life as a whole, and we are spying on life as a concept, and examining each little piece and evaluating it as though it were unique and brand new to us.  All this with a love of a railroad company taking the driver’s seat, and being good at whatever work one does in the passenger seat.

Post-a-day 2018

reading to…?

I feel this sort of desperation regarding reading still, as though there is something very specific and very important to be gained by reading some undetermined but great number of books, and it is on a sort of time limitation – I must go through them as fast as possible in order to make everything okay.

Because, I guess, everything is not okay right now.

But… what if everything actually is okay right now?

…But, if it is, then what’s with the reading frenzy?

Post-a-day 2018