Read more books

This dovetails well with my “go on tour” goal pretty well. During my 2002 cross-country trip I picked out the largest, most inpenetrable books in my shelf that I would never read otherwise, because Canada is a large country and small books would barely be a drop in the bucket that is the vastness of the prairies. That got me through Gravity’s Rainbow and Moby Dick.

Fortunately I’m blessed with a constitution allowing me to read while in a moving vehicle, so I hope to take my upcoming two-month spell on the highway as an opportunity to finish off Don Quixote and maybe some Dostoevsky. What’s this? A collected anthology of Mark Twain’s writings? Okay, I’ll stow it next to Augustine’s City of God. Big books for big trips.

Though it’s understood that reading web sites and newspapers /really/ doesn’t count (except /against/ this goal), I think that going down to the library and picking up enormous stacks of trade paperback compilations of comix past + present (and the occasional graphic novel—not the catch-all term the marketers would deceive you with) is at least good practice for reading more books… going through all of the relevant motions, at the very least. And really, is there something qualitatively different between what I’m getting from Persepolis and what I would be getting from Reading Lolita In Tehran?

In any case, the Linus Pauling quantities of Alan Moore I’m consuming (for free!) surely can’t be a bad thing.