For Those of You Who Are Readers

Not all of us are big readers of daily newspapers, much less books anymore, but from the time I could hold a hard copy book through now, I have been a voracious reader of almost anything I can get my hands on. Now there are limits to what I enjoy, of course: all readers have tastes and preferences, and mine are as eclectic as anyone else’s who reads a lot. For me, the things I generally steer away from are horror, science fiction, utopian fiction, and bodice-ripper novels.

While I once read lots of natural science and history, my “goto” pastime books these days focus on crime, police and private detectives, and mysteries. For the past 20 years or more, I have tracked my books completed (or at least 50 pages read before rejecting further torture from that particular combination of paper and ink), and generally I get through anywhere from 75 to 100 books a year.

Happily, the Fayette Library and Archives subscribes to a service that lends out digital books for free, so (even if I wait a week or more for a particular title) I need not pay an arm and a leg to acquire the books I so enjoy reading. Of course, Amazon and Second Chance also get plenty of business from me for their used books. What bargains are there to be enjoyed! Free to several dollars gets me access to all I can imagine wanting to read. Of course, the Fayette Library also has a hard book collection, but I do find it harder to get there very often (steps or ramp, it’s hard: see below).

There is little order to my madness, other than the six to eight books chosen by a book club I am a member of in Seguin, my former home. For the past fifteen years or so, our reading list has often had at least one book dealing with World War II, probably due to our awareness (even if subconscious at selection time) that the generation who fought that war is dying out, most military veterans of it now having reached their upper 90s in age.

This year we are reading a fictionalized account of the Ukrainian woman sniper recruited into the Russian Army, who had the most “kills” of German soldiers by Russian snipers fighting on the Eastern Front or anywhere in that war. The book, The Diamond Eye, by Kate Quinn, is brutal in parts, given the protagonist’s work, but it is a great read about the reality of war from a woman’s perspective while doing a so-called “man’s job.”

In real life Ludmila Pavlichenko came to the US on a “goodwill tour” as a guest of the Roosevelts, giving demonstrations of her marksmanship on firing ranges across the country to disbelieving crowds, and she became close to Eleanor Roosevelt, who actually visited her friend “Mila” after the war was over in Europe. The war was hard on both women, who lost their husbands during the war years, so it is no wonder they found things they had in common.

War calls on people to do extraordinary things. But it doesn’t take a war to call us to make sacrifices, does it? We watched medical personnel, for example, working unending shifts in Covidstruck hospitals and nursing homes across the country for almost two years. Many of them lost their lives, and others lost family members and close friends. Some suffered burnout so severe they had to leave medicine or nursing altogether.

And the restricted access some of us had to other medical care during that time is taking a toll still on the health (mental and physical) ofAmericans and our neighbors all across the Earth. I myself blame my own back trouble to having given up twiceweekly workouts with a fitness trainer during Covid, and before I knew it, I had developed severe lumbar compression, which plagues me still.

So no matter how much I want to spend my idle time reading all those books out there (favorite T-shirt slogan = “Too many books, too little time!”), I have my exercises that I must set aside time for every day: 45 minutes on the recumbent bike; another 30 for walking (sometimes in the house, with my rolling walker); and another 30-45 minutes for stretching and marching and side-steps and balance exercises, etc.

After all, if I don’t want to be confined to a wheelchair the rest of my earthly life (and I don’t, if I can help it), the books here will wait. And I do pray that St. Peter has a really complete, even universal, library collection in heaven for me to dig into, for the ones that are still on my list but that I didn’t get to read in this life!

Keep reading; keep active; keep looking after one another and God’s creation, dear friends.