A New Years Resolution or A Tolkien Gesture

 Today is J..R.R. Tolkien's birthday.  I have long been an admirer of his work.  It started when I went on a field trip in school to a puppet version of The Hobbit.  On the occasion of my first trip to Mackinaw Island, my parents purchased me a set of his Lord Of The Rings Trilogy.  It was never actually intended to be a trilogy, it was published in 3 parts due to it's bulk and in case it proved to be a failure.

It of course was not a failure, being one of the best selling and most loved books of all time.  I on the other hand have failed many times in my attempts to read or even listen to the entirety of Fellowship of The Rings, the first installment of the work.  This is a cause of some embarrassment for me, and also a point of friction between myself and my son, who had read all 3 installments while he was still a tween. 

I am actually a much bigger fan of his fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis and generally read all 7 books of Chronicles of Narnia every year.  I have decided in honor of Tolkien's birthday that I will attempt yet again to read this magnificent tome.  Two years ago I was successful at my attempt to finish Moby Dick, this year I hope to finish LOTR. I will start  to read it this Winter and attempt to complete it by the end of Spring.  If I still haven't finished it by the beginning of Summer, I will complete the rest by listening to an audio version.  I will give myself to September 2nd, which is the day Tolkien died.  This years it falls on my eldest daughter's 25th birthday, and  thus a easy to remember due date.  If all goes well I will repeat the process in 2025 and 2026 for the final 2 installments.  I will update my progress here with my installments of Last 5 Next Ten. 

The first 40 days of Reading 2023

 One of my Januarying tasks was to get back into reading and listening to books.  Last year, I pretty much stopped reading altogether at the end of July. As I referred to here and here. August through December of 2022 was a crazy busy time of my life; as a result, some things got dropped and books certainly didn't get picked up.

Over Christmas Break I started reading again.  Today is the 40th day of the year and so far I have finished 8 books.

They are  Listed by Title, Author, How obtained, How Consumed

Dead Center                                  David Rosenfelt          Hoopla                Listened to from phone

Heaven                                           Randy Alcorn             Own                    Read (to self)

Dryer's English                               Benjamin Dryer         Local Library     Read (to self and others)

A Big Day for Baseball                  Mary Pope Osborn     Classroom         Read (to self)

Big Nate: Welcome To My World   Lincoln Pierce           Classroom         Read (to self)

Play Dead                                        David Rosenfelt          Hoopla             Listened to from phone

Billy Graham: America's Pastor      Geoff & Janet Benge  Hoopla             Listened to from phone

Unnatural Death                               Dorothy L. Sayers      Hoopla             Read from my Ipad. 

That's 8 books finished in 40 days.  There are 365 days this year which means to find out how many books I'm on pace to read in a year you would just multiply 8 times 9.125 which us of course 73 books.  

I guess since I've mentioned the last 8 books I've read I've also technically mentioned the last five as well  That being said, here are 10 books that I am currently working on or hoping to get too soon.

The Annotated Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen Annotated and Edited by David M. Shapard.

The Last Sweet Mile - Allen Levi

Write Better - Andrew T. Le Peau

Gentle and Lowly - Dane Ortlund

Luke - The Gospel of Amazement - Michael Card

What To Do on Thursday - Jay E. Adams. 

75 Readings - An Anthology

Heroes of the Faith - Gene Fedele

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L. Sayers

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

If I were to complete all 10 of these books in the next 40 days Then I would be on pace to finish 81 books by year's end.  My wife is sure to annihilate any kind of total I should accumulate as she is a reading machine.  

For those familiar with my reading ways you may wonder why there are no C.S. Lewis books on the docket. This is by design.  I do plan to read all of the Chronicles of Narnia this year as I've done most every year since I was 16.  The difference this year is I decided to put them off a little bit and concentrate on other books at the beginning of the year. .  When I do get to them, I have decided to read them in alphabetical order rather than chronological or Narnian historical order as I have in the past.  This means I'll start with The Horse and His Boy and end with the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  

It's good to have started the year on a reading note.  Hopefully, I'll be back soon with news of 5 more books completed.

Love,

Dave

 

Januarying

 January 2023 is in the books, more proof that the calendar plays for keeps.  My wife thinks that this January would never end and was glad to see the back of it (Sorry, she had Downton Abbey on , and I couldn't help myself.). For me, January ended too quickly, I hadn't finished all my Januarying. 

I've always been  a little bit uncertain when it comes to  what I think about New Year's resolutions.  On one hand, I think that they are a colossal waste of time because we should always be trying to improve ourselves and we  don't need December 31st telling us what to do.  On the other hand, there are definitely things I like to try to accomplish every year and January 1st seems like a good time to start accomplishing those things.

Some of these goals (I do like goals better than resolutions) vary from year to year and many of them don't get accomplished.  I do spend quite a bit of time each January planning to accomplish them, which is why I call making a game plan for the goals, Januarying. 

One goal I have every year is to average 10,000 steps a day for the year.  2022 is the only year so far I have met that goal.  I had come close in 2021 averaging around 9,200 steps a day.  It really was a tale of two halves where I averaged just 7,000 steps from January to June and then averaged close to 11,500 to close out the year.  I made my goal for 2022 to be averaging at least 10,000 steps for the entire year (In 2005 White Sox parlance we call that going wire to wire). To that end I walked 26,122 steps on Jauary 1st.  We had a small party at out house on New Years Eve  and after our guests left, I walked our neighborhood for a little while.  Most of the steps came later that day when I got the job of patrolling the movie theatre where I work which means walking up and down 12 theatres every 20 or 30 minutes to make sure  the equipment and audience members are behaving appropriately.  

This year I decided to approach repeating my accomplishment differently. I made a calendar in my mind and decided in advance how many steps I wanted to get on the given month.  At the end of the year, If I make all my goals I will have again averaged  over 10,000 steps for the year.  In January, I set my goal for far lower than 10,000 but still beat the average I set for myself by more than 1,000 steps a day.  

Some of my other Januarying goals have to do with or are chronicled on my blog.  I will be posting more soon about my goals of watching 12 new movies (to me) and reviewing them here, and my reading goal for the year.  So. Ill just table such discussion for now, except to say that I have spent quite a bit of Januarying plotting out some of the books and films I want to consume this year and going about consuming them.  Each December and January I spend time redesigning my blog. I have especially enjoyed  linking some new blogs to mine in a space called Blog Try Outs. One such blog is called Laws of Gravity The caretaker of Laws of Gravity is a substitute teacher like myself.

At my advanced age of 58 years, 4 months, 1 week, 4 days and 12 hours (It's actually 11 hours, but I still have to edit this post.) , I am beginning to hear more and more about finishing well.  I feel like I might be a tad young for that, but Januarying has been instrumental in helping me start well.  

Closing the book on Barbara Walters, Pope Benedict, and Pele and opening a book on Heaven

 In the last 3 days of 2022 3 cultural icons, game changers in their respected fields of sports, newscasting, and theology had their lives come to an earthly end.  To put it simply there was really no one like either Pele, Barbara Walters or Pope Benedict XVI.  Each of their lives were characterized  by a passion for their calling that transitioned into being a revered elder statesperson as their journeys continued.  

                                                                            Pele 1940 - 2022

Barbara Walters 1929 -2022

Pope Benedict XVI

While people were shuffling off this mortal coil left and right at years end, I was spending some time preparing for the new year.  Putting things away in proper places, working on the design and content of my blog, I even spent some time putting together books I'd like to read this year. One such book was a small 60 page pamphlet called Heaven by Randy Alcorn.   I collected the booklet somewhere in my travels, it is a book of answers to questions about Heaven.  The questions and answers were culled from a bigger book by Alcorn, also called Heaven.  

I'm not really trying to tie in the recent deaths of international icons with a book I'm preparing to read.  When my Grandfather died in late 1997 I had just proposed to Amy.  At the wake, I felt like discussing my engagement would be taking away from the celebration of my Grandpa's life.  I remember my Dad encouraging me to talk about it.  He said that people needed to be reminded that life goes on even in the midst of death.  In the same way, I think making plans for the future and reading up on my future home are good ways for life to go on.

I hope all of you are enjoying a woinderful beginning to your new year.  

 Love,

Dave.

 

 

Moby Dick: My White Whale

 White Whale - Something that someone pursues obsessively with little chance of success.

In 1993, when I was teaching English Literature while living in Russia I taught the first chapter of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  I had never read Moby Dick before and was only provided multiple copies of the first chapter.  The chapter contains probably the best first paragraph of a novel I have ever read.  The first sentence, Call me Ishamael is highly regarded as one of the best opening sentences ever written.  It is not, however, my favorite opening sentence.  That distinction belongs to the first sentence of C.S. Lewis's voyage of the Dawn Treader, "There once was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.".

I have asked Dave from Dave out Loud to come in from out of  the loud and read the first paragraph for us.

I hope you can see how amazing of a first paragraph this really is.  The entire first chapter made me want to read the entire book.  This is when the troubles began.

What I mean by troubles is that I was in Russia almost 30 years ago and I still haven't finished the book. 

I read quite a lot while I was in Russia, but I never got the opportunity to read Moby Dick in it's entirety while there.  A few years after I returned from Russia I picked up a paperback copy of Moby Dick at this relatively new bookstore called Barnes & Noble.  I think it sat on a shelf for a few more years before I actually began to attempt to read it. 

 Moby Dick is a brilliantly written book but it seems to be a very difficult book to read.  Moby Dick is approximately 209,000 words not the worlds largest novel by any means but it won't ever be confused with short.  The Great Gatsby by comparison is approximately 47,000 words long , To Kill A Mockingbird is just in excess of 100,000,  and the aforementioned Dawn Treader is just shy of 53,000 words.  Add those 3 together and Moby Dick is almost 10,000 words longer.  

Also after the first paragraph the book became much more cumbersome for me to read.

Here is a list I pulled from Quora of 10 reasons why this is a difficult book to read:

1. The book is a long read at 822 pages. This does not make it the longest novel ever written but it's certainly a long swim.
2. The format of the novel is odd. It ranges from traditional story telling to essays on the different species of whales to philosophy.
3. Herman Melville has a big vocabularly. If your preparing for the GRE Moby Dick is good preperation for the vocabularly section of the test.
4. Melville draws from many classics of western civilization. If you have not read the Bible, Shakespeare, or Plato his ideas will go right over your head.
5. Moby Dick was written a couple hundred years ago. The reader may need to do historical research to better understand the lives of sailors in that time period.
6. Moby Dick is not only a story about whale hunting. The whole back drop of the story is whale hunting. Why did they hunt whales? They needed whale oil for their lamps and cooking. This is a story about energy and what lengths we will go to provide society with it. I think this goes over many readers heads.
7. Moby Dick is a dense book. It must be chewed on and thought about. It's meaning and themes don't explain themselves.
8. Moby Dick is about life experiences that many of us can't relate to. Most readers don't understand the terror of the ocean, the hard work of harvesting energy, and the bitter loneliness of being away from friends and family for a long time. Rest assured Moby Dick captures real human experiences.
9. The book contains lots of symbols and metaphors and they don't easily explain themselves.
10. The whole. Once you add all nine of these things together into one book many people may decide Moby Dick is not a voyage worth taking. Rest assured it is. It will grow you as a person and give a perspective on life that is hard to find anywhere else. You will be glad when you finish this whale sized book.

Just a quick note about reason 5.  Moby Dick is not a couple hundred years old.  It is 161 years old and will not be a couple hundred years old until I am 96 years old.  But I concede the point, it is an old book.  

Over the years I have made several attempts to read Moby Dick and have never gotten very far in my attempts.  A couple years ago, I changed my strategy about reading Moby Dick and borrowed an audiocopy of the book on Hoopla from my library and have been listening to it on and off since then.  I did this mostly between April 2020 and April 2021 when I was working overnights at a local grocery store and would listen to the book for 1/2 hour or so before going to bed after my shift.  

Through this method I have gotten farther through it than I ever did reading it.  I got about 40 % through it this way. At some point I stopped reading it thinking I would get back to it eventually and didn't really until this Spring.  

Every year during the summer months, specifically the100 or so day period between Memorial Day and Labor Day I embark on a personal Summer reading program.  I tend to spend more time reading during that time  and try to read at least 10 books during that period secretly hoping to read more like 20 to 25.

This year my only goal is to finish one book and that book of course is Moby Dick.  I have finished 42 chapters and am about 1/3 trough the book.  I  am sure I will read more books than just Moby Dick this summer but I'll be much more satisfied to finish this white whale than if I read 25 other ones and this one still tasked me.