Seems like I'm having a bit of bandwidth trouble. The images that I included in my last post seem a little sluggish loading. I'm lucky if they load once every five times I try to open this page. The image tags are correct; I am wondering if
imgspot is having difficulty handling all the traffic on their server, being a dedicated image-hosting site.
I figured that imgspot was my best bet for free image hosting -- no membership, no bandwidth restrictions, no pop-ups, no ads, etc... It seems that reliability may be the big hindrance. At this point, I really don't want to go through all the trouble of finding another freebie image-hosting server. I already tried hotlinking photos from my Yahoo! photo album, and from my webspace on Geocities. The attempt was not fruitful in the very least. Enough about me griping about my web trivialities. This blog is free; so are the images. You get what you pay for.
So I decided I wanted to go book shopping today. There have been a number of books that I have been yearning to read for some time. For those who know me, you will know that I don't find a lot of time to read. I mean, I have been trying to read
Terry Brooks' novel Antrax for a couple years now. The last time I attempted to read a book, my mind was so cluttered with other thoughts, that I was completely unable to concentrate on the plot. It makes it very difficult for me to sit down, tune out everything and immerse myself in a good book. I guess that's what happens when you read and write technical reports for a living. On average I crank out one 15-page report every four hours. That's uh...
7500 pages in one year.
What is defined as a good book is of course a subjective one, and as I get older I am becoming more opinionated about what I define as a good work of literature. I have pretty much had enough of what I consider "trashy literature". This covers just about anything under the sun, but romance novels are a good start to my definition. Actually, I am beginning to think that most modern fiction is written in haste. I understand that the book business is like any other business; find a formula that sells, and stick to it. This formula has made many writers very rich. While others are virtually unknown to the masses. Do these writers, who publish 1, 2, 3 or more books a year really have something important to say?
I have spent a great deal of my education looking for answers. These answers are as elusive as the questions themselves. The questions I have been asking are both specific and general, they range from why the world is the way it is, as well as how the world works they way it does. It is about the heavens and the stars, about the behaviors of atoms and molecules, and even the interrelationships we have with our families, friends, plants and wildlife. I am beginning to think that I don't even know what questions I am asking anymore.
Very few fiction writers have managed to write priceless works of art, that manage to tell a bigger story than what appears between the covers. The main purpose of fiction is to entertain, but often fiction writers use the medium to communicate ideas that wouldn't be effective in another medium. These are the books you were forced to read in High School, but hated every minute of it. Recall Golding's
Lord of the Flies. Now you can take this book at face value, and you won't get much out of it. This book is all about the idea of Civilization in a Bottle. There are dozens of questions that could be raised such as: Is man innately good, or evil? Are we (humans) naturally murderous savages? Could mankind exist without laws and moral conduct?
It has been at least a dozen years since I had the pleasure of reading Golding's masterpiece, but the themes and ideas haunt me to this day. I often wonder if there would be any more effective way that Golding could communicate his ideas. I suppose that people communicate their ideas in the medium the feel best able to communicate with. That would explain why some people are scientists, while others paint, compose music, make movies, or write.
Being as cheap as I am, I decided to pass by the massive discount big-box book realtors and go hunting for some good literature in the old used bookshops and thrift stores. Often you can find book at these shops for a couple bucks or less. just like my CD's, I don't want to spend a fortune accumulating a library of literature -- I already did that the seven years I was in University.
Well I struck gold. I came home with five literary works that may be considered some of the best literature in history. I picked up copies of Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451 and Wyndham's
The Chrysalids for next to nothing. Both are excellent reads, if you look at the themes and compare them to the events of the last century. Certainly the Nazi book-burning bonfires strike a chord with Bradbury's book; just as the acts of genocide have striking parallels to the Chrysalids.
Two novels I picked up were written before the time of Christ. I have been interested in Greek history for a number of years. I had the opportunity to take an Archaeology class featuring Greek and Roman art, and we got a brief synopsis of Greek and Roman history in the course, but certainly not in the detail I had hoped. So, in these shops today, I picked up copies of Homer's
Iliad, and
Odyssey. The Iliad has been written in verse, and proves to be one of the hardest reads I have ever attempted.
The fifth masterpiece is only thirty years old, and had been recommended reading for a University course I took a number of years ago. Pirsing's
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not a work of fiction, but a autobiographical account of his quest for meaning in his life. I, a person who has felt like his life is mundane and repetitive in recent months, can identify with the themes in this book. It may just have the answers to a few of the questions I have been asking myself recently.
Maybe there are no answers. But it might just tell me where to look for them. I will most definitely post my reactions to these books when I finish reading. That could very well be one hundred years from now.
I have finished reading Pirsigs' Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was quite an enlightening read. I must admit to you all that there were answers in that book -- some of them were to questions I had been asking, but it certainly did not answer all. It probably had raised another few dozen questions, so I'm somewhat back to square one. I do however, feel enlightened to some degree, even though I wouldn't say the book has changed my outlook on life. I'm still grumpy ol' me.
