Book Reviews – Coming Soon

As someone who spent about three years in college, I am haunted by that period of my life. After college, I spent about ten years in sales when my main focus was on being happy. Nobody wanted to buy anything from anyone if they weren’t nice.

Then, after leaving my sales job, I quickly discovered that I didn’t know a lot about anything. I didn’t have a ‘trade’ and wasn’t an expert in anything. I was raised by a mother who I can’t recall ever reading or discussing a book other than the farmer’s almanac or newspaper articles about how to cure an ailment.

As someone with a high IQ, I felt lacking in the knowledge department. I started spending a lot of time in book stores. When I say a lot of time, I mean to say I basically spent all of my spare time in book stores. I started building a library of books. Many of the books were about topics that just seemed interesting. A lot of the books about technology, in hind sight, were nice reads but were quickly obsolete.

Absorbing book content is difficult for me if I can’t tie it into something I already know. I don’t retain random facts very well, in part because I don’t see the use. It is common for me to scan an entire book and only retain one or two key points. Talking about books helps me to retain content because I can connect the content to the person and visually remember that person.

I recently organized most of my books into categories. A personal library. While I do have a good number of non-fiction books, I lean towards fiction.

When I was in my early teens, I spent a summer reading books. One of those books was a Stephen King Novel called ‘Different Seasons.” The book consists of 4 novellas. One of the stories is a dramatic tale of a newspaper boy who befriends a customer on his route and then learned the customer was once a Nazi. The boy and the Nazi end up killing people. While reading, I felt I was creating these characters in my head. Unlike a movie, the characters were now built inside of me, something I did not like one bit.

After reading that book, I took a negative view of non-fiction, leaning more toward factual stories with actual knowledge. I continue to enjoy movies and consider myself a movie-guy but do not like to read the books prior to watching the movies. I love music documentaries.

We are at the tale end of summer 2022 and I was not able to get in as much reading as I had hoped going into the summer. Work has been slow and instead of going out and finding more work, I’ve decided to spend a bit of time catching up on reading.

I will start by going through my library and re-reading some of the books and posting reviews on this blog. I will open comments for you if you want to discuss the book but may have to close comments if I get a lot of bot spam, something I often see.

Thanks for reading.