My dad, when I was young, told me that reading was the best thing a person could do. It didn't matter what you read, only that you did so. He said that it opened the world up for you through the eyes, words and opinions of others. He died in 1999 at the age of 92. He saw it all. He mostly did it all as well. He was a combat infantryman in WWII as well as a POW for a time. His life straddled the days of horses and crapping in an outhouse against watching men land upon the moon while we tried to bridge the divides of race and other things that set us apart. He never finished the 10th grade, but he read everything between dust jackets. He taught himself algebra, geometry, physics and other sciences late at night when he got home from his job at the Post Office. He was a master welder and a fisherman par excellance. He communed with his God on the banks of a trout stream. He was the best man I ever knew.
So...I can't sit here and tell you titles and authors, only that I read everything, just like he taught me. Science fiction, mysteries, fiction, non fiction, history and on and on and on. I am not one for remembering who or why or what, only that I have read and absorbed. As a result am truly lettered in observation, but a master of nothing. I am content.
SWMBO always tells me that other people's opinions that deviate from mine are as strongly held as mine. I tell her that it's true, but there is a difference. I am right and they are wrong. Unless of course they have read more stuff than I.
