yeah, i went from reading 0 books to reading Too Many books all at once.
for some reason i am on a history kick and it’s both fun and a slog. i can’t say why primary sources are so delicious to me, but they take a lot more of my brainpower to sit and interpret, and i can’t plow through the entire journals of louis and clark in two days like i can for a novel. but by comparison, a regular biography is unsatisfying. i love the tedious details, what can i say.
unfortunately for me a lot of these i can only get copies of online, since they’re public domain. my library system doesn’t have any satisfactory physical versions. i much, much prefer to read a book in my hands and have a lot of trouble with concentration and reading comprehension in digital formats (even handheld readers), so combined with ye olde fashionned language means it just takes me a long ass time to finish something.
so at any rate i’m splitting my attention between the aforementioned Louis and Clark (and learning a lot about what was actually going on, rather than the dull generic version i was taught in school), a collection of letters of the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who i’m suddenly very interested in), Thoreau’s journal (abridged but all the bits in it are good and surprisingly soothing, also it’s very quotable), volume 5 of the Foxfire books (found in a used bookstore), and a biography of David Douglas (you may remember him from such trees as the Douglas Fir, and literally any species named douglasii), which just makes me wish i could read his journals too.
i don’t know when my brain suddenly decided it was capable of reading stuff like this and fitting it into a wider historical context. maybe i had an especially garbage education, but i had no concept of events when i was a kid, and i guess up until maybe 5 years ago. is this what being an adult feels like? now i can see how this stuff fits together and i love it! i love it.
