Reading Not Reading

I had been happily reading some library books mostly about the fur trade and the indigenous peoples of the Canadian West, a topic of abiding interest to me. I have described the origins of this interest here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-beaver.html

However the world as too much with me, and my concentration not all it should be at present so I returned them. I will borrow then again. I am holding on to library books on the history of the Madan and the history of the Anishinaabeg peoples for better days.

So instead I reread a couple of novels by my beloved Andre Norton and have set my sights on reading Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare". I have been watching a youtube series on reading the classics by a young man using the "name" Drunzo" and want to make the reading a few classics part of my routine, with definite goals.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC72a8QL142vdH3s6Dn3NVRA

Helen and I discovered a youtube series on the history of Godzilla, and we follow each episode by watching, in my case, often rewatching the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/c/BigActionBill

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes and a photo from this summer at the cabin.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours
of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres,
meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns
taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia,
Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like;
which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many
men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights;
peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion
of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our
ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions,
schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now
come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,
jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,
sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,
cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals,
burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical,
then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created,
to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours
conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another
breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then
again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public
news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world"


from Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton