Reading Connections

I love reading.  A good book often will make me feel better.  I learn a great deal from reading.  In fact, I have noticed a very strange thing that occurs often as I read.  It happens more with a nonfiction book than a novel or fictional mystery.  I will be reading along when I come across a person’s name, a place name, an event in history, or just some other tidbit that jars my memory of something I had recently read somewhere.  Sometimes I saw it on television.  Whatever it was, it starts a chain of connections to other books that I have either read or more likely, want to read and they are lying around the loft waiting their turn.  Now, they go up on the priority list.

The latest example came as recently on a past Sunday.  I was re-reading Anthony Price’s first spy mystery, “The Labyrinth Makers”.  Towards the end of the story, David Audley, an agent for British Intelligence and the main character of the series, is given a gift book by a good friend of his who helps him often in his cases.  The book was Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”.  I’m still not sure what the connection was to the overall plot, but knowing Price there was a connection.  But that is not the point I’m trying to make.  The point is that I was reading another book about Tolkien and Lewis and have been seriously considering reading the Rings book. 

As I thought about this serendipitous event and what I was reading, I found that this was not the only “connection”.  The plot of the mystery involved missing treasure from Troy.  And that conjured up in my mind two other books that I have been thinking of reading – The Iliad and The Odyssey.  Why was I thinking already of these two classics by Homer?  Because I had just read an article in The New Yorker about a writer, director, and producer named Brian Doerries who has been using the classics as a way to help war veterans and current military, including commanders, deal with the trauma of war.  I found one of his books and I now own it.

When these Reading Connections happen most of the time they are straightforward or branch off and go in other directions.  But sometimes they are circular.  These connections do two things for me. One, I almost always learn something new from them.  Two, it almost always changes my reading list.  I wander off to follow my new interest and where it leads me.

Unfortunately for my reading list, the Reading Connections is not the only wolf in the woods.  

(Gadugi 11)