Bummer Reading List

I read a lot. Enough so that I end up re-reading stuff I have read many times before. It recently occurred to me that mostly what I read is garbage.

I used to love anti-establishment books like It Can't Happen Here, 1984, and Brave New World. Now I find the protagonists to be weak and thoroughly unlikeable troublemakers (Animal Farm is still OK, for reasons I can't really put my finger on). I even used to have a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook because it was purportedly cool to own it, but even way back then I thought it was puerile and impractical and just plain stupid. I can't picture myself owning a copy now even for kitsch value.

Stephen King's The Stand was my all-time favorite book until I saw the absolutely horrible mini-series with Molly Ringwald as Frannie Goldsmith. I remember thinking at the time that she was a total insult to the memory I had of her character. But when I picked up the expanded version of that book and re-read it I discovered that she nailed the part perfectly. Many of the actors and actresses were awful and the directing and screenplay adaption were abysmal, but she was not the problem.

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The problem was that the character herself is whiny and childish and really just plain silly. Years later I read the book again. A closer examination of my previously cherished parts of the book revealed that 90% of the characters had outrageous flaws that would be grossly out of place in a non-crazy real-life human being. As I grew more and more impatient with the odd outward behavior and very wacko internal monologues, I found this book was far from perfect and about 500 pages longer than it needed to be.

I re-read my once beloved Hitchhiker's Guide series and found the humor is very forced and the main character (Arthur Dent) is a petulant moron that never seems to get the hang of anything. The last two extremely disjointed books of the series should have never been written - they dragged and dragged and just made me angry in an "ineffable" way.

I feel the same disappointment for all of the Dilbert books, too.

Most of the popular science books I used to love describe how cool everything is going to be once we are all flying our fusion-powered quantum-computer-based AI-driven rocket-cars... On the moon... Tomorrow... Or maybe next Thursday at the very latest. It was fun to look forward to that, but I am going to be putting the lot of them up on craigslist shortly.

So what is different? Why are these comforting old friends of the past no longer entertaining? Is it just because I am older and grumpier and it's time to put away childish things or whatever?

Eh... Maybe, but I don't think so. I think what I am discovering about myself is that I am more of a builder than a destroyer. Much of what I listed above has a definite "destruction of the status quo" theme ( even the future-y science-y books) and that makes "now-me" a little uncomfortable, frankly.

I like painting rooms, sanding old wood, repurposing discarded furniture, and mowing lawns. I like to work with my hands to craft a firepit from leftover stone and to use my mind to discover the key to a difficult cipher. I like seeing things grow be they fescue out front, a tomato plant out back, or my son crawling around all points in between. In short, I like when my efforts make my little world a marginally better place and I prefer when it takes a little while to get that way (because instantaneous wish fulfillment is just another form of chaos, after all).

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And if that means that my flying car won't be delivered until Friday, I'm totally cool with that.