Book club

I have a great need at the moment to read serious books, the kind of books so serious they can make me laugh. I need real light, not light I cannot see.

My hero died in a rest home, with a copy of Dante's Inferno bedside his bed. It's somewhere among his effects, a book worn out from his reading, from him taking it from place to place.

Does anyone read this way anymore?

Most of my friends and other people I know do read, but they don't read this way. If they do they don't tell me about it. They tend to read what other people read, what other people have been told by other people to read. There's nothing wrong with this I suppose, at least it's reading, and Wittgenstein is said to have read murder mysteries and westerns, presumably for entertainment. 

I'm reading Rabelais for the first time, Gargantua and Pantagruel. I had no idea how much comfort I'd find in the humor of this great saga. It's too big a book to put in my back pocket and carry around with me wherever I go, but I'd put it there if I could.

I keep Laurence Sterne near when I write, a constant inspiration, both a primer on real-life critical thinking and a guide to good writing. Beckett too, I admire Beckett so much, the first writer I ever read who fought so fiercely with his language and made that fight his issue, his central concern. Clarice Lispector: every serious reader must read her.

There are so many wonderful books. I could read to the end of my life and not read them all.

I read just enough of them to know I don't read enough. 

I hope someday to be able to tell a book by its cover, something you're not supposed to do. I would argue you're allowed to tell a book by its cover, but only after years of serious reading.