Monday Meet n’ Greet

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Let us get to know each other:
Comment and share a little about your love of books and/or coffee/tea.

Source: Cafe Meet n’ Greet
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I Read Because…

41 thoughts on “Monday Meet n’ Greet”

  2. Truthfully, I’d rather not live, but I saw this as a shameless plug opportunity for Beauty by Robin McKinley. That book is amazing anyway, but it’s been my go-to through good times and bad. I never get tired of it, which is really saying something, since it is already a re-telling of one of the most well-known stories ever conceived.

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  3. Rather not pick, lol. My favorite book by far would have to be 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, but I’d rather read it as a comic drawn by Takehiko Inoue (just wishful thinking). I also remember gobbling up Death of a King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka. Other than that, mostly short stories and comics.

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  5. I’d have to go with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. My favourite book. Very well written, such unique characters, an interesting plot with lots of detail – I think I’d learn something different from it everytime I read it.

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  9. It should not surprise me; but yet it does at times, that some individuals say they don’t read books. The level of ignorance, the loss to them of so much beauty in the world seen from another’s eyes…the loss of introspection to ignore who they might be able to become if only….

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  10. I’d rather not live. I have two many personalities inside my head and I could never satisfy them all with one book. Anthologies came to mind but what if we get bored. May as well end it now. 😉

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  12. Pingback: My Article Read (3-14-2016) – My Daily Musing

      • He’s one of my favourite writers of all time…the story was entertaining, suspenseful, funny, fascinating, and touching (I bawled several times…it released pent-up emotion–first, for the characters…but then, it became a conduit to my own personal loss (metaphorically speaking–not literal death). Which book would you choose? 🙂 Also, thanks for connecting 🙂

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      • Ironic, I read War and Peace in High School, yet read it again on my last deployment to Iraq. I started to understand it then. Hindsight of experience does bequeath to us some bits of wisdom after a time.

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      • Hi, there! Thank you for joining in 🙂 Would it be a pain for you to give me some insight into what you took away from reading War and Peace? And, you read it in High School?! I imagine it is a daunting read…heavy? Lastly, I am such a fan of retrospective learning…I guess it’s the way I process things….probably because I tend to miss the trees for the forest in my zeal to “get it right, right now”.

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      • Hi; no problem. I’ve always been a fan of strong character development. In my youth I read fairly exclusively, good science fiction. The Masters; Campbell, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark and so many others. A lot of there works took from the classics. When I read War and Peace it was the first book of classic literature that I seem to connect with in a visceral way.

        It wasn’t just a story, it was an existence of real people as seen through the author’s eyes. Yet poetic in nature at the same time. In some ways my experience with Russian Literature was like reading the Grapes of Wrath, the first pages dealt with nothing but dirt, heat, corn and a grubby texture to life that you can just feel. Tolstoy helped me see life from the Russian perspective. In some ways like us, yet damaged. By war, by strife, just surviving at times from generation to generation. I went on to read much of Kafka the same way. An understanding of the metaphors they used so much to convey the philosophical hurdles that the introspective among us tend to become addictived to understanding.

        It is a long read, and some of my thoughts probably are more informed and logical now, then if you had asked me this question while I was in high school. The best example I can give is Melville’s Moby Dick. I’ve read that book every year since leaving high school. My sons asked the question: Why do I keep rereading it? The story does not change.

        My response was: True. But I do, every year, every day, every second. Wisdom is rendered from the pages of what life experiences we come to understand within ourselves. Reading Moby Dick each year, I see the pages, the story through the lens of those steps by which my own small bits of wisdom tend to come.

        Hope your day goes well…..

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      • Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for the privilege of your insight and perspective…how brilliant you are…and generous. As much as I love reading (and writing), I haven’t read any of “the classics”, but I can certainly relate to the metamorphosis that we continually go through…that is something I am trying to be increasingly mindful of–so as to become the best me I can be. I am so very grateful that our paths have crossed. I am going to “follow” you, and I look forward to the privilege. I’m home (for a second day) with what seems to be the flu–but a milder version, so I have high hopes for feeling well enough for work tomorrow. I am not sure where you are, but in my neck of the woods (in New Brunswick, Canada) there is something going around. Take care and I hope you, too, have a peaceful day 🙂

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      • The privilege is mine. I find such questions as yours the catalyst by which even in my youth, pushed me to answer things I generalized to much on the surface, forced me to swim deeper into the ideas of the day, the things I was reading, the observations of people in general.

        Yea I understand the bugs..they are going around. I live in the Midwest. Split my time between Nashville where my younger son lives and my older son in Fort Wayne Indiana. So I get a double dose from my kids.

        I approach books, learning in general the way most of us approach food. There is the comfort food we read to just enjoy the moment or pass the time. The flash reads that give us a boost, like candy in the check out lane of the store. You don’t need it, empty calories; but you impulse buy and get the rush, then regret breaking your diet.

        There are the meals of classic writers all formal and rich in calories, leaving you stuffed with knowledge overload, sleepy and tired like a large thanksgiving dinner. Yet there is the elegant literature, poetic, like butterflies fluttering through your mind with new thoughts and storms of understanding that leave you stronger, spiritual balanced, emotionally at peace for the first time since the last meal you found that fit the palette of your taste.

        I hope you recover quickly and find the meal of your choice every day.
        .

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      • I also want to thank you for “liking” my posts…that is a massive compliment coming from you (not that I am not appreciative of everyone who let’s me know they appreciate what I have to offer). 🙂

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      • What a great insight, we do change and develop, mature and evolve. It is wise to see that as a tool in your literary pleasures and ambitions. I have had similar reading experience when re-reading something years later, but never did it occur to me to approach it with purpose as you have. Thank you for sharing.

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  14. Oh, how I appreciate the way you express yourself….I adore metaphors and analogies…I am giddy after reading of the three types of “food groups” you so wonderfully wrote about….your words are absolute treasures…they resonate with the majesty and wisdom of your soul. I am so amazed and gratified that you so adeptly captured the differences in readings…you think on so many deep levels….that speaks to me. Thank you for taking the time to enrich us 🙂

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    • Thank you. Admittedly I’ve played with writing in my youth; but it never captured my soul as it as of late. I suppose maybe I have more to say, more to learn to absorb spiritually at some level. I suppose we never see the mirror of who we are unless we find some creative form of release. Some of the soldiers and Marines I know have taken up painting, cooking….all sorts of creative processes to help them with some of there issues.

      Again thanks for your kinds words….have a great week…

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    • Sounds like a good plan to me. We forget at times that books are things of the imagination, of spirit, of physical morphisms of life, emotional trains by which we move from some aspect of our life we wish to leave or to go to.

      I can just see it now, reading a train schedule as the form and flow of life; of nature rolls by us. The books of my past, books of my mind come to be played out on the stage set for me by the schedule I read. “Murder of the Orient Express”, our favorite detective walking us through his logic. The trip Sherlock and Watson took in solving the puzzle found in the story “Hounds of the Baskervilles,” “The Great Train Robbery.” Maybe it’s horror, science fiction, a romance through the alps, so many places to see and go, so many books to read and imagine the nature of what story is just outside my window, as the conductor walks by, the femme-fatale winks at me from the across the room.

      A book is a trip within our imagination as we interpret the nature of a new world created from the minds eye of the author. it trains us; no pun intended, to see the worlds we can create on our own. A person who complains: “I’m bored, there is nothing to do.” Is lost to a far-off land called: “The wasteland of ignorance.” A land populated by many; but never very many who find a way out with the book of there choice. A train schedule, a leaflet, flyer, a roadside, comic book, or just a small child playing with a train asking: “Where should we go today.

      Hope everyone’s week goes well…..i

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