Has anyone ever reached adulthood without having been presented with a list of books that "everyone" should read?
Wait!!
Come on back, I'm not going to bore you with another such list. Maybe later, but it will be well marked, and it is likely to be a list of favorite books, rather than ones that I think are important enough to deserve attention.
My first experience with a book I thought I should read was Moby Dick. I ended up with copy while I was in school, and I tried starting it several times. I couldn't get past the first hundred pages. It was just too boring. It was only years later, when I downloaded a free copy for Kindle that I finally got through it.
In many ways, Moby Dick is almost more like a documentary essay on whaling than what I think of as a novel. It is only towards the end that the story really takes off and moves quickly towards the end. When you finish it, you may remember as an exciting story, but it is really only the last quarter of the book that is exciting.
Then, I thought that I ought to read some Dickens. Back in school somewhere I read A Tale of Two Cities, and I thought I would move on to David Copperfield...especially since I had moved into the Copperfield neighbor and I was surrounded by streets with names taken from the book.
David Copperfield was even worse than Moby Dick. I still have never finished it. Eventually, I moved on to Bleak House.
I was watching QI, a BBC TV show, and they mentioned the case on which Bleak House is based...supposedly.
Now, Bleak House turned out to be much more up my alley. Some of it told by the very modest Esther, who turns out to be the daughter of someone very famous. If you haven't read it, go get it for free on Amazon and read it. It is well worth the time.
At the moment, I have one of these "important" books on my tablet and another waiting in the wings. What I cannot figure out is why I chose to read Walden first. So far, it is not too bad, though it is rather slow, as one might expect from a book that is basically philosophy with a small bit of autobiography thrown in.
The one in the wings is important to me, and I am told important to America, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. From an early age, I have been told that this is the book that lays out the concepts of capitalism that are at the foundation of American business.
I believe that in the 21st Century capitalism has basically run off the rails, though I think that it started to stray from the true philosophy of capitalism with the first Robber Barons, the industrialists who amassed huge fortunes by exploiting their employees.
Unfortunately, I do not have the foundation to back up that thought, and that is why I mean to start with Adam Smith. I want to know what his concepts were before I start really talking about how modern capitalism has strayed from the true faith.
One last thing...these types of books are often boring and hard to get through. The books I have mentioned here were not written for a man born in the midst of the 20th Century and raised on TV. I find I have to read something else to keep me sane. At the moment that is a collection of short stories about Lord Peter Wimsey. I love these stories and have read a fair number of them. They come out of the same period as Agatha Christie's novels and the works of P.G. Wodehouse, another favorite of mine.
