Short on Reading Time, Long on Pleasure

The way I see it, time is getting more and more precious, so I’m less and less embarrassed about reaching for the simplified version of something I still want to learn. If there’s a long and a short, I’ll often opt for the short, with clear conscience.

The birds are twittering, the field is more soggy than snowy, Easter is coming, and days continue to be jam-packed: kind of like a bulging suitcase that you have to press down hard to have a chance of zipping. Trouble is, what I want to do more than about anything is read, and regular life doesn’t allow nearly enough space for curling up in an armchair for a few hours.

Nonetheless, I’m here to celebrate a certain strategy that might at first glance seem pathetic but really can be very fulfilling. It works particularly well for tackling subjects that are plenty compelling and also daunting. Here it is, in a nutshell: If you can’t swing the long and winding paved road with breathtaking views, take the dirt shortcut through the brush and be grateful for it. 

Now, first let me hasten to say that this, at least in my experience, does not need to be the case with novels. I’ve just finished Richard Russo’s fabulous Everybody’s Fool, his latest, thanks to the 15 CDs in a pack I borrowed from the library. Wow, can this guy ever write! What a complete joy it was to have an actor named Mark Bramhall with me in the car for 19 hours, delivering this gem of a book. Thanks partly to how well he shifted voices, characters really came alive, with all their blemishes, heartaches, and moments of revelation. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a page, and now that it’s over I am actually bereft in the way you can get with the parting of a really good friend.

With non-fiction, however, it can be another story. Sure, for many topics, no condensed versions cut it. And if you really need to know everything, well then, don’t kid yourself. But I have a few titles to recommend, two of which are related.

Perhaps for obvious reasons, this one caught my eye a couple of months ago, when I did my usual browsing on the “New Book” shelf at the library. It also had a déjà vu look, but we’ll get to that soon.

 “This must be too good to be true,” I thought at first. How could anyone take such a mammoth subject and reduce it down to a slender volume like this? Must be some kind of joke, even. But then I checked out the back flap and saw that the author, Richard Holloway, was in fact “former Bishop of Edinburgh” and a very distinguished scholar. Back at home, my husband mentioned that during his divinity school days, he had met the man. No doubt whatsoever that he definitely knew his stuff.  So I embarked on a bright and cheery trip with a reputable guide. Chapter 1 bears the title “ Is Anybody There?” It begins this way:

 

What is religion? And where does it come from? Religion comes from the mind of the human animal, so it comes from us.

 

Holloway guides us through the origins and main tenets of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and more — all in 237 pleasurable pages. No substitute for reading the original texts in their entirety of course, but still this is a book that really can come in handy.

The déjà vu aspect comes from its resemblance to another book, also from Yale University Press, that became a huge hit back in 2005. I bet you’ve seen or read this one:

 The back cover describes it this way: “The international bestseller available in English for the first time: E. H. Gombrich’s world history for the curious of all ages.” Apparently the author, an Austrian who wrote in German, originally published the book in 1936, as a tale for children, and it was a huge hit. But the translation into English didn’t happen until he made it a priority late in his life; he died and an assistant finished the job. Good thing too—what a delightful volume. Why should children be the only ones to benefit from such an excellent kind of distillation of history? Here are a couple of sentences from the front flap:

 

In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of humanity from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science.

 

It’s a “colorful picture” all right, even with simple pen and ink sketches sprinkled throughout. Now here’s a book you can turn to again and again when you need a little brush-up. Which, in my case anyway, is often. 

When it comes to reading about science, I definitely need help in the simplification department. Since I never give up trying to get my mind around who discovered what and how the breakthroughs changed everything, my bookshelves are full of science-made-easier paperbacks.

There are equations and all, but they’re wedged in without being too intimidating. Sure, the quest is kind of ridiculous since I’ve always been more of a “wannabe” than someone who fully grasps this material. But hey, I can always keep trying, right? Doesn’t this help me ward off decline or something? I’m not quite ready to be able to explain to you what “quanta” are, but soon, soon.

 So my latest find is a little treasure, running only 81 pages. This guy Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who really cares about getting the good word out to the masses, succinctly.  You’ve got to give him a lot of credit. Maybe Stephen Hawking is the one who started all this “bring the work of geniuses down to regular people,” I don’t know, but I’m all for it.

So let the sand in the hourglass keep on falling. One of these days, just maybe I’ll be able to tell you when hourglasses were invented, which religions made use of them, and how we can predict whether sand would fall the same way out in space. More likely, though, I’ll be glad just to keep turning pages.