Gotta Read!

Where shall we go, you and I,
   on two wheels so sweet?
Anywhere, we have no care
   and need nothing to eat:
We'll dream our dreams
   inside the covers
and share our joys
   as gonzo book-lovers!

               =-=-=-=

Yes, this is almost what my little three-wheeled scooter looked like when we returned from the library two weeks ago! When you're an addict, MORE is always better! Art, travel, biography, and fiction all rode home, bouncing in my basket or waving wildly in a bag on my handlebars!

Not only do I HAVE to read...but in my reading I find inspiration to write...as that sagacious Stephen King said, "If you want to write, you need to read. A lot." or words to that effect.

What writer has absolutely charmed you, cannot wait to read more? Curious people want to know (in comments below?)

BTW, looks like my front tire needs a little air...I suspect nobody who knows me well would ever worry about my running out of (hot) air!

All I Want for Christmas...is more time to read!

Dunno if I like the graphic or the text better in this image!

More than once I've wondered if being the headmaster of a boys' prep school wouldn't be about the best job ever...or, mebbe, better still, being the underutilized librarian at said school! Mmm...books and learning...learning and books, yum!

Are you someone who loves to look around you and see rows or heaps and piles of books? Or, do you buy and read then pass along or resell? Me, I'm by nature acquisitive (and inquisitive!) but am learning to simplify, unacquire, and down-size. Happily, both my wife and I have always been library people...sadly, I tend to salivate to excess in bookstores or libraries! So many books, so little time!

There are some books that just MUST be acquired, read, and reread. Lewis and Tolkien, Scripture, and Robert Frost are life-long keepers for me. Howzabout you?

I Imagine, therefore, something is!

PHANTASY

"Remarkably, in the ancient traditions, the imagination or "phantasy" was considered a sense. In that psychology, in the detailed summary of Robert Burton's 1620 Anatomy of Melancholy, in addition to the outward senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch,
we have three inward senses: the Common Sense, Memory, and Phantasy. Burton stated:

Phantasy, or imagination...is an inward sense which doth more fully examine the species perceived by common sense, of things present or absent, and keeps them longer, recalling them to mind again, or making new of his own.

This old idea of imagination as a sense that produces "monstrous and prodigious things by recombining and re-forming the more orderly perceptions of memory and the other senses. As in dreams, the ingredients are familiar but the new reality is not."

--from: Robert Pinsky's SINGING SCHOOL: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. 2013. pg 148.

. . . . . . .

I like "monstruous and prodigious things" --guess that's why I write fiction and poetry and am a Stephen King fan...and a Dean Koontz fan...and CSLewis and Tolkien and Asimov and...you get the drift.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I traveled far and wide today

   I did not take a cab

I took neither bus nor car

   nor trip on substance from a lab.

I rode in comfort, but not by train,

   nor boat nor aeroplane.

Departure...arrival--by seconds parted:

   Yes, I got there, as soon as I started.

No luggage, no seatbelt,

   and no need for "security,"

I arrived by conveyance

   of eld, not futurity.

Yes, book in my lap

   and others beside

I tip my cap

   to my magical ride.

--DLS 11/9/13