Reading a lost pass-time

Last week I was thinking about how I find so many people I meet just don’t read they watch tv, they plug themselves into their computer, they know every song on their iPod , the internet is there second home. I mentioned in a conversation that Catch-22 was a book and was looked at blankly…however I began to realise that I was also succumbing to this vague malaise, I go to the library and get out videos…

I mean its cheaper than blockbuster…now and then i get out a book and then only half read it, so this article is about get on and read something. I mean books used to be cool, you can sit with a book and read and drink coffee and if a cool chcik talks to you you can hear what she is saying.

Books, I love them, novels you can get lost in, be taken on a ride on a journey through other peoples lives that stays with you in a way that a film never can, I have been walking in the woods with Pooh Bear, in the slaughterhouse as Dresden is bombed with Kurt Vonnegut and so on. I love to judge a book by its fiorst page, feel the need to select and be overawed by the numbers when going into a large bookshop.

I want to recomend 2 books I am reading at the moment the first Uriels Machine is an amazing factual account of 2 mens research into megalithic sites and a complete reappraisal of prehistory, their back ground in freemasonry gives them a starting point that others might not have as they seek to understand where there masonic traditions have really come from. I like this book because it appears well researched, uses material not just from oddballs but renowned intellectuals and researchers. Perhaps they could have made a stronger account for the opposition to their ideas so we can see where there research stands in context, but their ideas of megalithic measurement the over stressed desire of modern archaeology to see everything as a tomb if it has a body in it or not as the case maybe. The expand on the idea that many megalithic buildings are actually some way to measure movement in the sun and planets….but where they delve is the why, the passing of important knowledge from one generation to the next in the face of disaster brought about by the earths collision with a comet (twice), bringin about the destruction of civilisation.

The other book is a novel by Robert Silverburg called Roma Eterna its piece of hokum, an idea (The roman Empire never fell, no Christianity!) stretched to its limits…but I love it when a book can do this, it is really a series of short stories tenuously linked by ancestoral links and other aspects, sometimes it doesn’t quite work. However I like writers who are willing to take on big themes, a world where Moses never made it out of Aegypt and thus there is no Jesus, and in on of the stories an Arab with a Magnetic presecence called Mahmud…ahh but I would be giving it all away. I am not sure if silverburg is not also asking questions about Christianity, on the one hand its presence may have brought down the Romans on the other in one story we have a a more postiive end (survival) for the Maya/Inca/Aztecs…the comment on Christianity’s ability to put a stop to one lot of barbarity but then be the instigator of another lot is marked for me.

I love films and music, but you can’t beat a good book.

Related posts:

Related posts:

1. The Wrong Job
2. Idealism
3. iPod Noise pollution

• Search

  Log In

  Username
  

  Password
  

  Remember Me

• Facebook Status

  
  
  

  
  Jonathan Spencer : Posted a new post on their blog
  (Fri Jan 13, 12:26 pm).

• The Posts you read

  • Phone Hacking – What part did the phone companies play?
  • Honey, mint and onion – a salad garnish you won’t believe tastes this good
  • UK Riots and Looting, no easy answers
  • Wanted: Self-build plot, demolition or renovation near Lewes, East Sussex
  • 3 Great Places to visit in Southern Tuscany

• The Best Accounting Software

  
  
  

• Look