sunwalk, you are more than welcome
Thank YOU, it's amazing for me to talk to someone who has read and loved the same books...yes, I don't think the "Alice Toklas" book was the one I was reading, although I thought about reading it...maybe now I'll try it again. And I'll be sure to see about Oscar Wilde's stories for children... Thanks everyone for recommendations; now I'll have to go find Periodic Table (for example) and Steinbeck and Vonnegut (which I still have not read
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I read all the time, although most of it isn't "serious reading" - there are books I have to read slowly and pay a lot of attention to, and there are books I can read in one (short) sitting, mostly nonfiction: travel narratives, biographies, history, psychology; I like to read them occasionally, just for fun - like instead of watching TV
Most books aren't wonderful - in fact most are garbage - so when I read these "other" books I usually just skim and can get everything out of it that way - although if it's something I'm really interested in, then even books that aren't very well-written become much more valuable just because of their subject matter - this is kind of the way that I read a lot of history; the last books I read like that were A Concise History of Bulgaria and Einstein and Picasso
Kafka said something about how a book should be like an ax cracking through our frozen mind; if it's not deeply affecting us, our opinions, and our way of looking at the world then why are we wasting our time? This is what I like to get out of reading, a look at life as if from someone else's window.
Here are some books that I've liked that aren't fiction:
A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy. I like this book not so much for the "apology," which is fine, but for the foreward by C. P. Snow, which I've read several times; I think it is GREAT - it is mostly a portrait and biography of G. H. Hardy, who was a famous mathematician. It made me want to read more by C. P. Snow, who has written some novels and and addresses - when I was in Europe I saw some of his novels but at the time I didn't have enough money to buy them and I thought I'd wait until I came back to the states...bad idea...now I can't find them
I also liked Men of Mathematics, by E. T. Bell, and The Man who Deciphered Linear B (about Michael Ventris, an architect), and Gods, Graves, and Scholars (about archaeology and archaeologists like Petrie, Woolley, Layard, and the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, Champollion). I liked it so much I read a great biography of Austen Henry Layard - now I don't remember what it's called - and another one of Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor)...so apparently, a lot of biographies - also Les Mots (by Sartre, about his childhood), and Roald Dahl's Boy and Going Solo, and Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, about the last tsar of Russia. Also when I lived at home we had a 2-volume book on the composers, so for fun I would read those, all about Clara and Robert Schumann, Wagner's pretentious early work, Wolf being so poor he had to read piano scores like they were books.
Other good books: Blessings in Disguise, by Alec Guinness, and...I am getting back into fiction....Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and some of the Bond books by Ian Fleming: From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Dr. No, Octopussy...the later Bond movies took the titles but not the plots of the original novels, but the early ones are faithful. They're only OK, I guess, but kind of fun.
Something else that people like to read...does anyone read comics? In my opinion the best series is FoxTrot, by Bill Amend - it's very clever stuff - I highly recommend it
. He's been doing it for almost 20 years, probably, and there are several collections out
