#89 - Tips to Expand Your Reading
Facts For Well-Being; Novel Reading; The Speed of Faith
Hello, my friends,
If you’re wondering if there has been a time-shift and it’s Friday morning at 6:03a, than the answer is both yes and no. There has been a time-shift, but not one related to HMF. Indeed, it was just a busy week and Thursday evening, when I usually write the newsletter was used for trick-or-treating. I did write the first section early, but couldn’t get the other two done until today. For the record, no one complained, and for the price, who would?
Facts For Well-Being
It might be my age, but I think about factors of well-being a lot. Recently, on a long drive my mind kept drifting back to the idea that for all of the unknowns and controversy about the details of good habits, there are some pieces of health advice that are beyond argument; common sense stuff that is applicable to the majority of humans and with which no (or very few) experts would disagree. When I reached my destination, I wrote a few of them out and want to share them with you. Are these facts for well-being unanimous? You tell me!
Get an average of 8 hours of sleep a night. Human needs can differ very slightly in this regard, but not by much.
Movement is important throughout life, but even more so as we age. Again, exact needs differ; some people’s homeostasis requires a lot of intense movement, while some people are happy taking a 30-minute stroll a few times a week. The basic point is that everyone needs to be physically active.
Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables every day. There are many diets and eating regimens with all sorts of restrictions, but none of them disagree with this advice. If anyone mentions the carnivore diet, I’m sending you to stand in the corner!
Sugar (particularly foods high in refined sugar) should be eaten in strong moderation. Sweet stuff tastes delicious, but it causes so many problems!
Soda pop has got to stop! This is related to the advice on sugar. Everything about pop is bad for health. I’d even go as far as saying that people who drink a lot of soda are slowly poisoning themselves (where “a lot” may not be as a much as we think). That supermarkets have whole aisles full of soda feels insane.
Eating habits need to change with age. Our bodies change, metabolism slows down, how can we eat the same way and stay healthy? There’s no magic involved here, we can’t! Exercise can mitigate 20-year-old eating habits on a 45-year-old, but it catches up. I suspect this is why so many healthy young men grow bowling ball bellies ten to fifteen years out of high school.
Social interaction, and going even further, interdependence is important for well-being. Connection, depending on and being depended on keeps humans civilized and sane.
Am I missing any?
Novel Reading
I read a shifting variety of topics and genre not as much by choice, but by personality. Right now, I’m reading the novel Kokoro by Natsume Soseki and listening to the audiobook of On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy by Carl Rogers, along with perusing a bunch of books and articles on library history. While I think people should generally follow (and never apologize for) their reading tastes, I’m aware that there are folks out there who are in a reading rut and want to know ways to extend their literary perspective. As a librarian, this is one of my favorite problems to help people solve.
When doing readers advisory, we librarians depend on appeals (described succinctly in my 2017 article “A Librarian’s Guide to Choosing the Right Book for You”). Understanding the kinds of books (or even movies) you like, and features of those works that draw you together helps isolate other possibilities. For instance, if a reader of sci-fi novels wants to branch out, I would ask whether it is the taut plots of classic sci-fi adventures that they enjoy or if they’re more keen on the imaginative worlds? For taut plots, there are many mystery novels that they’d like or some narrative non-fiction, if they prefer true stories. For lovers of imaginative worlds, I might suggest fantasy or popular science titles with a strong and positive vision like Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken or those about unusual cultures, situations, or societies — like Tim Peake’s book Ask an Astronaut.
I haven’t read Tim Peake’s book, and that’s okay. When you go through enough books, you see patterns in literature and people that help put the two together. But expanding a reading list doesn’t require a librarian’s expertise. Once you identify what ‘appeals’ to you, moving to adjacent areas along those lines isn’t difficult. The world wide web is full of booklists and while many have a currency bias, it’s hard to complain about such abundance. Likewise, we should all revel in the amount and accessibility of books in our modern world. Never before have their been so many options!
With these options, we can also set appeals plus serendipity aside and deliberately pry open our reading focus. What do you want to learn? In what area would you like to expand? Curious about psychology? I am. That’s why after finishing the excellent Raising LGBTQ Allies by Chris Tompkins (who I hosted in a virtual library event a few weeks ago), I decided to go with a classic 1961 title by famed psychologist Carl Rogers. In terms of expansion, with the growth of awareness around diversity, equity, and inclusion, many people have decided to explicitly read more titles by BIPOC authors. This is one example, but there are many lines along which to expand — the most interesting to me is when people’s reading is driven by esoteric or multi-disciplinary questions. I’ve mentioned Ezra Butler’s newsletter, Colorphilia, before and it is clear from his kinetic references that he reads all over the map (sometimes literally) to bring us historical insights into color. Friend of the newsletter, Faith, has a Substack (and a forthcoming podcast) on The Beatles. I can only imagine her reading is both obsessively Beatles and also adjacent histories (she can probably confirm or deny my speculation in the comments).
Essentially, directions in reading are similar to ways of moving in space; you can go lower/deeper or higher/shallower. Consider historical topics — there are books in Big History or small history (on my shelf is a book called The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California by Glenn S. Dumke (Huntington Library, 1944), which is about 10 years in So Cal, a relatively short time in a relatively small geographical area), or even smaller (in the sense of interested readers) history. For example, I own a nice copy of The South Pasadena Public Library: It’s First Hundred Years 1895-1995 by Jane Apostal, which was designed by famed California printer Ward Ritchie. Reading can also go left and right, jumping to nearby genre or between fiction and non-fiction, or even off the rails to poetry and plays, and off any road whatsoever with artist’s books.
Books are fun! This is at least partially because there are so many. Revelling in them is one of my favorite of life’s activities and I don’t even have to leave the house!!
The Speed of Faith
One of my pet topics is the disintegration of social cohesion in the United States starting in roughly 1970 to the present. Secret societies, civic organizations, and organized religions, which were bulwarks of social connectedness over centuries have been (at first slowly, and now quickly) bleeding members over the past fifty years. There are many reasons for this change and a new one recently occurred to me. Perhaps one of the reasons religion has felt less relevant over the past decades (from the television into the information age) is because it is not quick enough to act as the ‘thought leader’ on topics that churn through our culture.
For centuries, religious organizations and their scripture has given people ways to think about anything that occurred. Whatever happened, religious figures could tell people how to think about it based on age-old wisdom and people listened. Part of the reason that this stayed true was because there was enough time and mental space to respond; society didn’t change as quickly because there was no information and communications technology (ICT) to rapidly spread information and ideas (memes, in its formal meaning). Most people also didn’t have access to as many authoritative voices.
Now, the messages of religions, despite their cosmic proportions, are ones among all the others. A grand narrative for existence is one thing, but it also has to encompass and bring into itself everyday occurrences. And while there are plenty of religious figures with large platforms and many followers, those followers also follow Taylor Swift and Elon Musk and, I don’t know, Cristiano Ronaldo (currently #3 on X). So even if people really, really like Joel Osteen — not that many compared to Ronaldo, by the way — he may only be their main man on Sunday.
Following this idea of speedy spread of information as detrimental to social cohesion, fast-moving social media platforms like Tik Tok are only helping to push forward this trend. I’m going to stop with identifying this social movement and not provide a forecast, though I have some thoughts and may spend some words on possible futures in upcoming issues.
Time Machine
Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #36):
Feedback Hoop: On providing and receiving critique on creative work.
Centuries of It: The generational constraints on psychotherapy.
A Community That Scares Together…: Lauding Halloween as a low-stakes way to build neighborly feeling.
While I was reading the first section I was eating a large slice of cherry pie. Whoops.