As I look over pages of this blog,
https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/
I find many references to books.
All my life, books have been important. They help me do the usual things you hear about: take me to unusual places, have adventures without the bother of spending money or driving to an airport. Like YouTube videos, they explain things I want to know about.
The most fun course I taught was "Personal Reading for Professional Development". It was a graduate course and graduate students in education are working on a master's degree or already have one. By the time a teacher reaches that level, they have read many books. So, in that course, I took the path of having the students think back over the books they have read. The idea was to make a list of all the books they read, at least the ones they could remember. As they looked at each other's lists, they often found a title that they recognized but had forgotten about, only to realize it too had been important, surprised that it had meant so much but hadn't come to mind.
Because reading can so deeply enrich one's life, I often ask what others are reading. I get a range of reactions. In the reading course, we adopted the title "Lockeroom Lust" to stand for sexy books. Since we were past our young years, we knew the heat that can be generated by stories about sex. What we called "bodice rippers" told about passion out of control, books that everyone had read and no one claimed.
As I wrote the other day, the Harvard Classics can be downloaded from Amazon for $2. The whole set, fiction and non-fiction, comes to 71 authors. I have a small amount of familiarity with classics but in general, I have read more math, statistics, computing and more recent authors. I adopted "Moby Dick" as an example of a famous book that everyone "should" read but that I haven't. I picked on the whale story so many times that I felt I should read the book, but I only gave it a few chapters before moving to something else I was more interested in.
This post is titled "Interactions with a book" instead of "Reading" since today, tools such as Amazon, Google, the Kindle reader and apps that allow me to borrow electronic library books thru the air make all sorts of other actions possible besides reading. Besides, being older, many words and remarks elicit reactions and questions which result in leaving the page to check, communicate, tabulate, reflect and fume.
