Frame of reference

I have never read a book by John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, Janet Evanovich, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Sue Grafton.

I read a couple of the Oprah Book Club selections and found them to be horribly depressing.

I haven’t even read the Harry Potter books, although I plan to someday, once I think that I can get past all of the hype. (I have seen and enjoyed the films numerous times.)

I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings. Or Dracula. I don’t see what’s so amazing and wonderful and fantastic about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I consider Stuart Sutcliffe to be the actual fifth Beatle.

Springsteen is brilliant. He has the world’s greatest band backing him up, and he knows it.

Neil Gaiman is brilliant, and William Gibson probably is too.

I think that with all of the gadgets, James Bond must be compensating for something, though I couldn’t say exactly what. Maybe a rather two-dimensional personality.

Just because someone has something to say doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to hear it. I don’t often feel the need to be right at the expense of someone else being wrong. I am a big fan of the saying "to each his own" and I don’t feel the need to alter the gender of the pronoun.

I make a point of trying to be nice to security guards, janitorial staff, flight attendants, and retail and food service employees. I overtip in restaurants.

My favorite book of all time is The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee runs a close second. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White also holds a place very close to my heart.

Bedtime reading as a child included Kipling’s Just So Stories and the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales. My favorite was The Frog Prince, and my favorite part was when the princess becomes so irritated with the frog that she picks him up and hurls him against the wall. I am by no means a fan of cruelty to animals. I think it was more about him being irritating and her taking decisive action in an unpleasant situation.

I was classically–and possibly excessively–educated, which means that I read parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek and that there are several hundred lines of Shakespeare permanently lodged in my memory, but there are holes in that education. The Shakespeare plays I have read are mostly comedies and tragedies, as opposed to histories. I have read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but not Ulysses or Dubliners. I have read The Sun Also Rises but not A Farewell to Arms. I have read Crime and Punishment but not War and Peace. (I know. Two different authors, but both icons of Russian literature.) I have read The Hunchback of Notre Dame but have been on page three hundred of Les Miserables for the last fifteen years. I have read The Picture of Dorian Gray but not The Importance of Being Earnest.

I fancy myself a student of history, but I tend to be selective. The American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the War Between the States are my favorites. I have no patience for Manifest Destiny or the Crusades. I don’t suffer dictators gladly. I’ve heard quite enough about the Holocaust, thank you. I prefer my Greeks and Romans to be mythical. Ancient history is all just one big guess. I appreciate the irony of the British Empire stretching to India and into Africa, and yet the English being unable to rule the whole of their own island, or the smaller one off the northwestern shore. Eastern Europe, the countries of Africa, Russia and the rest of Asia are mysteries I plan to explore someday. The ancient feuds of European and Middle Eastern tribes fascinate me. So much hatred amidst so much tradition. The wars of the twentieth century were too disastrous, monstrous and brutal to have possibly been worth the price they exacted. I live in a narcissistic country that deeply regrets not being old enough to be a colonial or imperialistic power and is now trying to catch up with its elders.

Whatever problems I may be facing, at the end of the day I try to remember that there are so many people who are less fortunate than I and be grateful and appreciative of what I have. Perspective. Perspective is good.