My reading has fallen behind significantly.  My reading list is lost somewhere or – to be more accurate – it is… unlost.  I have many different copies lying around that I must sort out.  There should be a word for this kind of opposite of lost.  A famine of plenty?  Nah.  In any case, I finished a couple of books last year that I think I’ll discuss some other day.  Today I can only report that I’m still working my way through Moby Dick.  I find the writing beautiful:  some of the sentence structures are little ornaments carved of words.  Strange, but it is never pretentious.  Except on another level, where I get the feeling that the narrator is pretentious on purpose, and knows he is being pretentious, and knows that the reader knows this too.

I still have about 150 pages to go and at this stage I understand or have seen very little of the fabled deeper meanings.  Perhaps the search for deeper meaning in the text is exactly what the whole story is about.

I read for pleasure and I’m always struck by the striking quotations that other people pick up from the books they read.  I wonder if they read with the fixed goal of finding quotations, or whether they are simply more observant.  Perhaps they can read at many different levels at the same time.  I’m not that clever and I’m far to greedy, so I just read read read.  But I did try this other style for one chapter.  It is difficult to find a sentence without the word “whale” or “Leviathan” or some reference to whale anatomy.  But I *did* come across the following (very generic) but useful phrase:

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Somehow very fitting for much of my life.