Dedicated to: (You may skip this part but then you may be one of the people I'm thanking and then you would feel really bad if you never knew that I was thanking you, wouldn't you? ) Don't worry, I'm confusing myself too. Anyway, dedicated to by secret catergory and in no particular order of gratefulness: My mom and dad, Rachel and Lori Jo, and Sandy.
From a precognitive age (as my parents are both bibliophiles) I have loved books. However, over the last several years or so due to health issues or a self-suspected case of late onset A.D.D. ............................. (oops, sorry, I'm back now)... or perhaps some other unknown factor, I do not know, I have not been able to read much more than my friends' and family's Facebook profiles, a wikipedia paragraph or my completed Crosstics puzzle quote before I lose interest and put the reading aside.
[Techical Stuff: Yes, part of that last paragraph has an infintisimal little bit of a Jane Austen feel to it, I detect that. I do confess to very easily succumbing to the perhaps most romantic of the classical writers...but I jump ahead of myself.]
[Technical Technical Stuff: Yes, the irony of my confessing a short attention span and then asking you to keep with me during this lengthy introspective is not lost on me.]
One day it suddenly occured to me that I am a couple of years shy of 50 (sigh and sssshhhhh) and there are so many classic books out there with which I've always assumed I would "get around to" reading that even if I read nonstop between now and my eventual death at a very sagacious 110 years of age I could barely put a dent in all the great literature that may perhaps still intrigue, stimulate or edify me if I could/would but only push myself to read past the first chapter or two.
[Remember: (Sorry, cat's out of the bag. I have read more that just one paragraph or two at a time in recent years. Let's upgrade that to a page a two at a time.)]
[Technical Stuff: And Yes, that last nonbulleted paragraph was probably just a really really really run-on sentence, but fess up. Some of the old guys like Dickens did like to put together lonnnnnng sentences. You could fall asleep and take a nap a wake up two hours later if someone was reading but one Hawthrone sentence to you during story time.]
And you guessed it (being as intelligent and preceptive as you are)- I am going to start reading (but not here to you) of the abundance of dried ink but not dried-idea treaures called "classic literature" (novels primarily) and just see where it gets me by that time 60 something years from now when I joyfully and with full attention enter the Pearly Gates. (A.D.D is not a factor up there.)
And so this morning, picking up seemingly at random off the bottom corner-shelf of my mother's room-size much labored-over personal library, I come across a tome with the following dedication- a sure sign that THIS is the book to start with! "TO MY MOST PATIENT READER AND MOST CHARITABLE CRITIC, MY AGED MOTHER, THIS VOLUMN IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED" Ah, now this is a well-written dedication, is it not?
[Tip: (If you can guess who/what it is without using a search engine of any sort, consider yourself the recipient of a cyber brownie)]
And this particular tome has these opening lines in the preface: "This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive." Now, THIS is great stuff. This dude is really drawing me in (oops-gave a clue towards that cyber brownie).
............... Okay, I'm back now. THAT was my daughter's fault. She ousted me 30 minutes ago from the computer so she could take 5 minutes to send a quick e-mail......
And, anyway gotta go. I'm taking a CD sleeve being used as an impromtu bookmark out of ch. 1 pg 1 and am starting on my quest for the classics. My first trip is a date with "Markie Babie". He wasn't the cutest of authors but you gotta kinda love those funny guys. It's a charm thing. See ya!
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