6 Years Old!

Babbling Books is six years old today. In past years on my blogiversary I have extolled the virtues of the book blogger community. I will again acknowledge my fellow book bloggers.  The community is indeed the best part of book blogging. This community  is what has kept me blogging over the course of years. 

When I started blogging six years ago I wanted my site to be more then just book reviews. I wanted to explore history, social issues, politics, religion as well as a plethora of other topics and ideas.  I wanted to approach these concepts from a bookish point of view. I hope that to some extent I have succeeded. I try to tackle these topics both in my commentary on individual books as well as in standalone posts.  

In a perfect world I would blog more. I would like to put up more posts related to ideas, social issues and perhaps politics. Books and reading relate to all these things. Time constraints unfortunately limit me. With that, though I am not big on New Years Resolutions, I will endeavor to post more in the coming year. Of course, I also want to read more books. That, in the end needs to be my number one priority.

Many of my fellow bloggers have posted lists of their planed reads for the year. I also have a lot of tentative reading plans. There are so many great books waiting in the wings. There are so many fascinating topics to explore. Thus, the coming year promises to be great year for blogging. I hope that will be the case for all my blogger friends as well as for myself. 

Happy reading everybody!

First Post!

I love to read. I really love to read.  I always have loved reading. Since I was a child I have always gotten excited at the prospect of beginning a new book. I daydream about books and sometimes I even dream about them.

 Thus I am starting this blog. I want to begin a record chronicling my thoughts on the various works that I complete. Along the way I may throw in some random musing about society, politics, current events, etc.

Though my tastes have matured, reading is the one hobby that I have consistently stuck with since childhood. I am not an expert in most of the subjects that I read about. My greatest qualification is that I am an insatiably curious person.

So why do I read so much? What should people get out of reading?  The answer is different for all individuals. For me, this is a quest. I am trying to piece together and understand the world.  I am SO very interested in human thought, human history and human culture. After these “people” interests, the natural world also holds immense fascinations for me.

As I love serious literature, history, science, business and other subjects, I can be described as a generalist. However I do believe that everyone should have at least one area that they concentrate upon. So for me, it is the history of Revolutionary era  America. I make a conscious effort to read about one third to one half of my history in this area. A little bit of specialization never hurt!

One question, repeated over and over again for me, and ultimately related to why I read, and is simply: what to read next? Over the last few years I have been somewhat careful about what books to tackle. There is so little time! In several of his books, Harold Bloom emphasizes the point that if the average human lifespan is about 70 years, one would barely make it thorough Bloom’s own of the Western Cannon, a list of fiction and philosophy that among other things, Bloom believes are worth reading. When I peruse the list of works contained in Bloom’s Cannon, there is scarcely anything listed that I would not want to read. Compounding my problem is that there are lots of works not on the Cannon that I also want to devour. These include many works of fiction, that perhaps Bloom would not approve of. In addition I am an avid reader of History. Then there are other fascinating branches of Non Fiction including science and business. I also cannot fail to mention rereading. This could take over a thousand years! Wasting time on unworthy tomes is a luxury that I do not have.

Over the past few years I have alleviating the problem just a little. As I do run and work out regularly, I find myself often hooked up to headphones. Thus, I have discovered audiobooks! Of course I need to be choosy as what to “read” this way.  I would not tackle something as dense as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow via spoken word. However, for many history books, or even some fiction with accessible prose, recorded books are nice way for me to add “book time” to my life. Audiobooks not withstanding, the vast array of titles that I am interested in, are overwhelming.

So here we go, happy reading everyone!