About reading

My friend Oren's mother was an avid reader. She would return from the library with a trunk load full of books, mostly murder mysteries if I remember correctly. Then she would devour them. At the pool you can see people with feet up on the stools, lazily spending the day under the umbrella relaxing with a book, a real book. My friends Barb and Rich seem to read as a duo, mostly history or historical fiction or other illuminating texts that they share when we are together. My niece, like many of her generation, loved the Harry Potter series, all 7 volumes.

But I have had a difficult time in the last 25 years with the physical skill that it takes to read a book. My eyesight took a turn for the worse in the 80s that resulted in not being able to maintain focus or do the necessary scanning across the page that reading requires. Then the computer and the internet and Google deccimated any sense of relaxed sustained reading power that I had.

Except for the New Yorker. For some reason, the joyously complex, sometimes sarcastic, but always to the point writing style has held my attention from the first time Michael and I used the long articles as read aloud materials for long road trips. First, of course the cartoons. Then both the short Talk of the Town pieces and longer reports intrigue me with their wit.  Going in and out of subscribing, they pile up in my living room, available for subway or commuter train rides and long hours at the pool (though this year that honor has gone exclusively to my Civil War reading)

So what a revelation to step into a library, a university library and walk down the  EE aisle to browse the Drexel stacks. From Lincoln to the total collection of the chronicles of the War of the Rebellion  I have to quickly decide how I am going to approach choosing books to read. My first goal is to get the overview of the timeline, which helps me become familiar with the personalities and their  motivations. I start with battles that I plan to visit, and other books that give me more insight into the war as a whole, then to the strategies of the generals. These books are page turners, written as detective stories.

I check out 4 books, hitting the jackpot with  Desperate Engagement by Marc Leepson,  about the  months before during and after the battle of Monocacy which is my next road trip on July 12.
Other books that draw me in are Five lectures on the American Civil War by Raimondo Luraghi, When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan Sarna  and The American Civil War by John Keegan. Then Victors in Blue and A soldiers diary. Each has a tale to tell, a view of the prism that is this complex war.

I shake my head, at times gasp, at other times look out into space pondering the calamity of it all and how current so much of it seems to me.