Sam Smith – While I’m mostly engaged in the standard dysfunctions of the current pandemic, I have discovered one activity that occupies my time comfortably and which I have never tried before nor have I heard of anyone else doing it.
Namely, I am, on a daily basis, reading seven books. Why, you may well ask, should one read seven books at the same time rather than completing them serially? I have no good answer except that I tried it and it worked.
My standard procedure is to read a chapter, if short enough, or read to the next place where a larger visual gap is placed between paragraphs. You may well attribute this to a lack of attention span and I won’t argue with you, but I have noticed that in murder mysteries, for example, I don’t get tired of the length of time it takes to solve the damn thing. I just move on to another book. And it’s kind of exciting to have a day when you are trying to figure out a killer and how Winston Churchill is going to handle the next Nazi attack.
Three of my current books are in print while the other four are Kindled. Three are mysteries, two are biographical, one is a collection of delightful Facebook columns by Lt Tim Cotton of the Banger, Maine, police department, and one is Union, the astounding reorganization of American history by Colin Woodard to explain why we are less of a union than we pretend to be.
The best of the mysteries is by my friend Gar Roper, who died only recently, and who wrote Deadly Hypocrisy, a stunning description of a young girl attempting to figure out who had raped her in the woods. Meanwhile Woodard’s book and the biographical accounts do significant damage to some of my misconceptions of people like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And there are few thing more worth reading about than the inadequacies of the famous.
While with Roosevelt, it was his unfaithfulness to Eleanor about which I knew a little, with Wilson it was a level of racism that I had never learned about in school or thereafter.
I suppose some will accredit my leaping through bits of different books to a lack of attention, I attribute it to a happy solution for getting through a part of my day with still no contact with so many friends and other souls. I start not with just one project but with seven and as soon as I edit and post this column I will enjoy it all again today.
