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The first thing my mother taught me was to clean. We were the poorest of the poor, a 19 year old, uneducated girl with two children, alone in a garage loaned as shelter by a kind acquaintance. I never had new clothes and the ones I had were inadequate to the weather. We were always hungry and lived in places with spiders and rats and cockroaches but from the earliest age my mother had me scrubbing. Washboards and lye soap in concrete tubs came before wringer washers. Hanging clothes out on the line in all kinds of weather freezing to hang, frozen to remove. I was stood on a box to reach the ironing board at six. My life became always cleaning up after others until I ended up solitary in my concrete box in the sky with only myself to keep clean and pick up after. Mini rebellions surface, bathless for days, floors unwashed, dusting neglected, vacuuming abhorrent and avoided as long as possible. Certain things never neglected, laundry done practically the moment it is removed from body, dishes never allowed to pile up, stove top always gleaming, interior of fridge spotless. Clothes are changed from skin out daily, teeth are frequently neglected. I am currently reading Among the Bohemians about artists, writers, painters, sculptors, musicians from 1900 on who left their homes to congregate in squalor and starvation in garrets to serve their art. In the middle of a particular chapter on Mrs. Beeton's rules and the daily chores of women after the first world war deprived them all of cooks and cleaning women had me up and lifting rugs and shaking, sweeping tile floors and then washing them, scrubbing down cabinet doors, putting ruglets in wash. I was never artistic, didn't have any particular skill (except spelling :-) and generally floated through life oblivious of most things but long before women's liberation noise impinged, I always felt a sense of disconnect and dislike of the inequality between men and women as represented by housework. The constant, daily, repetition of the same tasks. The hour of my life gone as I swept and washed the floors, to experience a moment of pleasure at a job well done and over with and shining proof of accomplishment, only to have a man or children or animals come in and casually destroy it all in a matter of seconds and there it was to do all over again. A more thankless life I cannot imagine, no salary to show someone appreciates in any way, shape or form the action just taken and time spent. No gratitude or thanks or attempt to preserve the work. Here it was put in more stark terms, these women had a calling, a gift, a talent and in so many it was wasted, thrown away ..replaced by peeling potatoes and sweeping floors. I feel a bit like Pavlov's dog, a line or two in a book rang my bell and now I have clean floors and the urge to vacuum which I am resisting.
Just found this place. I read a lot, and I read fast and I re-read. My current year on Goodreads challenge stands at 279 books..my goal is 365. Retired and single so lots of time and freedom to do nothing but read. I follow my inclination which can take me anywhere. I don’t look at books for their quality of writing, their current or past popularity. I do tend to avoid best sellers. There are only two books I haven’t finished in my life… Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past ..I have the trilogy format and twice now I have gotten halfway through book two and funked it..the first time was I was interrupted and when I came back I had lost the thread and so put it aside till I could restart…restarted twenty years later and that time it bored me..the people were just so annoying and I didn’t care about any of the characters. The other book is the Bible..prefer the Boomer version :-) I love biographies, books of lists and information, books of quotations. Not up on contemporary fiction, currently reading my way through my personal library. I got a Kindle a few years ago and now have 1000 books on it…spent a few years reading cosy mysteries. Then another couple of years reading fan fiction zines in three fandoms. This year I picked off my own shelves. I started January 1 reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series in order right up through the new ones written by others and then moved on to Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and then all her other series plus a few biographies about her. Hospital Station series by James White; Dorsai by Dickson; Grimes series by A. Bertram Chandler, Falkayn&Van Rijn series by Poul Anderson; Flandry series by Poul Anderson; Flinx series by Alan Dean Foster; StarWellThurbRevolution by Panshin; Journeys of McGill Feighan by Kevin O’Donnell Jr., This week I am taking a breather from SciFi to read Do You Sleep in the Nude, Conversations in the Raw, People Are Crazy Here and Valentines and Vitriol by Rex Reed (tell me I am living in the past and you are right….the news these days is scary as hell. Next up and already on the bedside table is Spider Robinson’s Callahan series. Oh, I did read On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder which blew my mind. My bathroom reading is H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles 1347 pages of the tiniest damn print..I doubt I will live long enough or my eyes hold out long enough to finish that one. All of the above are mostly paperbacks I have owned forever. I am also reading Charles Greville’s Diaries..on volume 2 of 6…feel like Sisyphus…politics ugh. On my Kindle I am reading Sympathy for the Devil about Gore Vidal. On my Kobo I am reading Who Let The Dogs in by Molly Ivins. So many books, so little time. To answer the question..I am a pig. I am rereading...why am I spending money on new books. Because I am greedy beyond belief where books are concerned.
Spending my days, in between bouts of insanity over animals, putting covers to my books imported from Goodreads to LibraryThing. I feel like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault of gold, I am fingering my way through my vault of books.
I was just musing on my library and the books I read and realized no-one can judge me based on what I read because the range is vast. The only judgement anyone can make about me and books is...I read to the detriment of everything and everyone in my life and spend too much money on books. On every list of 100 Must Read Books...I generally have read at least 75-85 (not matter the type of list (scifi, classics, popular, encyclopedias, cartoons, biographies, autobiographies, dog care, cat care, famous writers oeuvre, books of quotations, books of jokes, books of famous people, books of photographs, mysteries and cosies and poetry. Barbara Cartland and Harlequin Romances had their place in my life at one time and so did Women's Weekly). One very important point is....I do not care what anyone else thinks...books are my life, the more the merrier. Nobody else reads enough to impress me. I have read Tolkien, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Russians. Kafka bored me, I could not finish Proust (though I got half way through the massive trilogy). I have read my share of literary fiction and genre fiction..I have no prejudices. I am not fussy about quality of writing just as I can eat steak today and eat weiners tomorrow..everything is grist for the mill.
On the other hand, if there were a computer programme that you could enter your entire read library into that would run an algorithm and spit out a judgement of who, what etc. about you based on what you read...I would like that. Humans, nope, they are too full of their own inadequacies and prejudices and jealousies and ignorance. You cannot really trust the opinions of other people. What they think of any given politician can be the result..today..of something they read or saw on television or in the news. So few people actually read enough to be entitled to an opinion of other people's reading matter.
As for my mood at the moment, I am relieved. My animals have made me frantic with worry and today I got a break and I am coming up from the pits or down from my flights of dungeon building in the sky.
I was just musing on my library and the books I read and realized no-one can judge me based on what I read because the range is vast. The only judgement anyone can make about me and books is...I read to the detriment of everything and everyone in my life and spend too much money on books. On every list of 100 Must Read Books...I generally have read at least 75-85 (not matter the type of list (scifi, classics, popular, encyclopedias, cartoons, biographies, autobiographies, dog care, cat care, famous writers oeuvre, books of quotations, books of jokes, books of famous people, books of photographs, mysteries and cosies and poetry. Barbara Cartland and Harlequin Romances had their place in my life at one time and so did Women's Weekly). One very important point is....I do not care what anyone else thinks...books are my life, the more the merrier. Nobody else reads enough to impress me. I have read Tolkien, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Russians. Kafka bored me, I could not finish Proust (though I got half way through the massive trilogy). I have read my share of literary fiction and genre fiction..I have no prejudices. I am not fussy about quality of writing just as I can eat steak today and eat weiners tomorrow..everything is grist for the mill.
On the other hand, if there were a computer programme that you could enter your entire read library into that would run an algorithm and spit out a judgement of who, what etc. about you based on what you read...I would like that. Humans, nope, they are too full of their own inadequacies and prejudices and jealousies and ignorance. You cannot really trust the opinions of other people. What they think of any given politician can be the result..today..of something they read or saw on television or in the news. So few people actually read enough to be entitled to an opinion of other people's reading matter.
As for my mood at the moment, I am relieved. My animals have made me frantic with worry and today I got a break and I am coming up from the pits or down from my flights of dungeon building in the sky.
