Given the way things are piling up in your life (time, most of all) you have to decide what to read and what not to. It's that simple. Lacking many possessions and not being fastidious toward them has resulted in a blasé attitude to things (though you suspect your wahabi sensibilities have something to do with it as well). So, the question of what to give up and what to keep has never really been a pertinent one. As long as your books are there, your comb is in the right place, then God is in his heaven and all is right in the world ..well, that's probably the only kind of order one can expect (in one's own life) given the way things have panned out.
But the pressing nature of time means asking, really, what do you want from a book. More to the point: what do you need, and is reading the best way of fulfilling those needs? Already that sounds frightfully self-conscious, far too much like a utilitarian. The lists will pile up and you will end up, like Buridan's Ass, paralyzed by indecision. And if someone were to say to you: east or west, Islam or enlightenment, you would turn and say: Yes!
Ultimately, the problem is that thinking about goodness and being good can often drift apart.
What kind of wisdom is it you're after, what kind of understanding of life can there be except from within life itself (which must include reading and a stepping back from life,but not be reduced to distances)?
N.Lezard highly recommends John Williams but the thought of reading about the wild west in deeply unappealing. Instead, a name is thrown up in the comments section....
"No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again. I can’t think of any fiction that introduces new elements of what used to be called “Human Nature,” nothing that isn’t present, say, in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The qualities of character, the machinery of suspense and climax, of mounting action and falling action: I don’t think we’ve seen anything new in that way. There are new clothes, because civilization can change, and we get out of armor and into doublet and hose, and then Brooks Brothers pants, but we’re still the same people, and doing the same things essentially. I think it’s a mistake to think originality amounts to that much...
Chekhov said he worked all his life to get the slave out of himself. I guess I feel my obligation is to get the selfishness and greed, which often translates as the Americanism, out of myself. I want to be a citizen of the culture, of the best the culture stands for, not of a nation or a party or an economic system."
But the pressing nature of time means asking, really, what do you want from a book. More to the point: what do you need, and is reading the best way of fulfilling those needs? Already that sounds frightfully self-conscious, far too much like a utilitarian. The lists will pile up and you will end up, like Buridan's Ass, paralyzed by indecision. And if someone were to say to you: east or west, Islam or enlightenment, you would turn and say: Yes!
Ultimately, the problem is that thinking about goodness and being good can often drift apart.
What kind of wisdom is it you're after, what kind of understanding of life can there be except from within life itself (which must include reading and a stepping back from life,but not be reduced to distances)?
N.Lezard highly recommends John Williams but the thought of reading about the wild west in deeply unappealing. Instead, a name is thrown up in the comments section....
"No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again. I can’t think of any fiction that introduces new elements of what used to be called “Human Nature,” nothing that isn’t present, say, in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The qualities of character, the machinery of suspense and climax, of mounting action and falling action: I don’t think we’ve seen anything new in that way. There are new clothes, because civilization can change, and we get out of armor and into doublet and hose, and then Brooks Brothers pants, but we’re still the same people, and doing the same things essentially. I think it’s a mistake to think originality amounts to that much...
Chekhov said he worked all his life to get the slave out of himself. I guess I feel my obligation is to get the selfishness and greed, which often translates as the Americanism, out of myself. I want to be a citizen of the culture, of the best the culture stands for, not of a nation or a party or an economic system."
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