Reading sunshine

Having gathered what thoughts are worth gathering--a number somewhere between one and zero--it comes to him to begin compiling a collection of books in which a reader may begin by reading anywhere.

He has in his hands at the moment The Life of Soren Kierkegaard and must be getting something out of watching it being born over and over again.)

Almost any book of poetry will do--exempting those programmatic volumes constructed like small novels and meant to be read from the beginning to the end. The recent Nobel Prize winner, Tomas Transtromer, who constructs each poem as a single experiential unit, so that reading one is as satisfying as reading many, is an ideal exempler of a writer of books that a reader may begin to read almost anywhere.

The Bible also comes to mind: "unbroken water" as the scholar Tim Reynolds describes the King James version.

The 'story' of Tristram Shandy begins with Tristram taking his mother and father to task over his own birth. Later in the book, his mother's final earthly remark is, "L---D...what is this story all about?"

Sterne, in a different book, wrote that "digressions are the sunshine of reading." Opening Sterne's Tristram randomly, the reader is confronted by a series of perfectly composed absurdities, which feels somewhat like the life he himself is living, but different.