Now that I’m back to driving into work every morning, I find myself with at least ninety minutes of time on my hands that needs to be filled with… something. It used to be NPR all the time, but I got a little tired of it just before I started working from home and switched to podcasts. Now the podcasts I’ve been listing to lately have become tedious, so I pivoted to audiobooks. I chose Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as my starting point as a number of the books I have read have pointed back to that one. I’m still plowing through the academic discussion that makes up the second part of the book, but the first half where he talks about the psychology of surviving the concentration camp is one of the more impactful things that I have ever heard. While I’ve always known about the Holocaust generally, thinking about the impact to a whole race of people is not nearly devastating as reading one man’s detailed account about his story of survival. I’m contemplating listening to Elie Weisel’s Night next or possibly pivoting to a similar expense in the form of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s.
I vacillated between reading and not through my entire life. I can read to distraction when I enjoy a book, but often struggle to get through those that I don’t. I would often pass over tremendously interesting books because I knew they would get me in trouble in favor of drier tomes that I didn’t mind putting down. Another part of the problem here is that I have a personal hang up over reading more than one book at a time. When I get stuck in a space where I can’t get into a book and move forward, I’m usually stuck for a good long time. Such is the case right now.
When I was young, I used to get a World Almanac every year. It contained over a thousand pages of facts and figures and trivial items. I read it cover to cover, every year and often reread random pages as time went on. I kept all the versions on a bookshelf in my room like trophies. Reading them, I crammed my head full of knowledge because you never knew when I’d need it. As might imagine, I absolutely crushed all-comers in Trivial Pursuit. These days, you don’t have to – you carry your cell phone everywhere you go. In some ways, this make me sad.
I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne when I was a junior in high school. To tell the truth, I just had to look up the entry on Wikipedia to remember just exactly how the plot went, but I vividly remember how the book made me feel at the time. Discovering the notion that a man of the cloth was fallible became the first sizable crack in my naïveté.
I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve even started several. I rush headlong into the project and write thirty or so pages before it all falls apart. Steven Pressfield calls this ‘the Resistance’ (note the big ‘R’). My hard drive is littered with the abandoned husks of failed attempts. It’s a miracle that this blog gets posted at times. Fortunately, the entries are short enough that my ‘Sesame Street’ attention span can occasionally make it through one.
I enjoy cookbooks. This shouldn’t be surprising to someone who loves to cook almost as much as I love to eat (and I do love to eat). The cookbooks I like, however, are a bit strange. I love old compilations that people used to throw together at a church or women’s groups or similar entities. Give me a spiralbound cookbook from a Methodist church and I will read it from cover to cover and be greatly entertained while doing so. They always contain interesting recipes, things thrown together that speak of the culture of the group. I can imagine potluck dish after potluck dish coming out of these books. Perhaps the king (or perhaps ‘queen’ would be the better choice of word here) of all cookbooks of this genre is More-with-Less by Doris Janzen Longacre. This Mennonite cookbook, given to me used by my roommate from college, contains not only recipes obtained from congregations all over the world, but practical advice on how to stretch your food budget as much as possible. It did its fair share in getting the Boss family through some very lean times. A quick search of Amazon shows that I have an older version of the book. Newer versions apparently have more pictures, less wisdom, and content skewed towards modern tastes. I’ll keep my tried and true version, thank you.