Summertime Ambitions Part 2

Moving on from my manly, wood shop ambitions, let's talk about something less masculine. And that thing is reading. Okay, I don't want to put a bad light on reading, but it's not necessarily macho. In fact, I would say it's simply a gender neutral scholarly pursuit. Now that we've got all the politics out of the way, I'd like to discuss what I want to read and why. Just recently I started reading due to a couple reasons. One is that I need to as a requirement for AP Lang and the other was that it was nice outside and I needed a book to help me enjoy the weather. So I took that advice of a friend and picked out a book by Kurt Vonnegut. The book was "A Man Without A Country" which turns out to be one of his last works. A compilation of his essays, "A Man Without A Country" is full of these wonderful writings that incorporate his contemporary ideas with a very old fashioned diction. One of my favorite quotes from the book is as follows: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." That statement was the driving point of a little anecdote about going to the post office rather than sending an email. Vonnegut has this hilarious way of saying everything, even his most liberal agendas, in the most old-fashioned tone. He sounds like an angry old man, which is entertaining in itself, and because of his subject matter the writing is even more enjoyable. Sorry that I went on for so long about Vonnegut but he really is great and I highly recommend him. Anywho, I realized when I was reading that good books are actually worth reading. Taking Vonnegut as an example one last time, his book was actually engaging and fun to read and because of that I forgot that I was technically still reading for school. I think it's because we are so often "required" or "forced" to read by our teachers that we loose interest in it and deem reading as just another thing we have to do for academics and forget that it can actually be enjoyable. I'm not going to say that I love reading everything because reading Great Expectations was easily the most miserable experience of my life. It was fucking awful. But, I'm now trying to find good authors and interesting subjects to read about so that I can enjoy reading once again and maybe learn something over this summer (forgot we were still on that subject, didn't you?).

Looks like we'll need another post to finish this one up, see ya next time!