Thursday, April 6, 2017

April Update

A List--Mencken--American Language....................652/697


B List--Sinclair Lewis--Arrowsmith.........................337/448


C List--Ray Bradbury--Golden Apples of the Sun....234/338


I hit a negative trifecta of sorts this month with all of the three authors being dead white American males. They were even all alive at the same time from 1920-1951. I am joking of course to some extent, I am not riled up by the idea of this on political grounds, however if I am reading multiple books at the same time, I like the contrast between them to be a little stronger. One might not think Lewis and Bradbury would be especially similar, but they are both Midwesterners with a pretty plain style, only about a generation apart, and with Arrowsmith largely being set in labs and medical settings, and Bradbury's stories employing a lot of scientific language as well, the literary effect is that of two authors whose familial relation is something akin to first cousins, unconscious though that may be. This aside, I am fond of books. I think a lot of Bradbury's ideas are clever, and he displays, in his early work at least, a sentimental streak that I was not expecting--I thought he would be more like Heinlein, who seemed to have more of a strictly rational and computer-like mind. The story of "The Big Black and White Game" which is not a science fiction story and was published in 1945 I thought was quite good. I also liked "The Rocket Man", "A Sound of Thunder" (time travel), "The Long Rain" (travel to Venus), "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl". There is at least one other one I especially liked that I am missing, but I don't have the book in front of me to see what it was.


I am essentially done with the Mencken book. I am in the Appendixes now. There was a lot of interesting stuff in it, though naturally much of the information is dated and perhaps not terribly fascinating to the non-specialist to begin with. Even in 1936 Mencken made the observation that "English forges ahead of all its competitors...simply because it is already spoken by more than half of all the people in the world who may be said, with any plausibility, to be worth knowing." Earlier he made the observation that "I" was the subject in about half of all sentences spoken by morons. Naturally I scurried to make a record of my percentage on my Twitter account (229 tweets at last count) and found I was at 46.7%.


I am going to start recording my weight here every month as well, for a while, to see what it tells me. I am not going on a diet or anything (yet), though I sense I will need to make some adjustments in my habits going forward. There is finally some light emerging at the end of what has been a long tunnel of having very small children. It's still like 3 years before the littlest one will be in school but the time is at least in sight. Anyway, this morning I weighed 229 pounds. I am 6 foot 3 so I am not morbidly obese, but that is a little too much for me. I suppose I might look all right at 205 or 210. I usually get down to 220 during the summer. I really just need to eat better. If I could integrate that healthier diet into an enhanced social or intellectual life I think I would have less of a problem doing it. But for those of us who are not really part of the educated classes socially speaking it seems to be more difficult to care enough. Because I don't want to look good just for me, I already am in love with myself; I would totally be doing it for the world to notice.


Pictures






Modern Library copy of Arrowsmith (which I am not using, btw! though I do like this cover)


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