Currently reading...

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. 

 

I was flipping through an old English textbook of mine reading a few of my favorite poems, and noticed a few references to Walden. I've always meant to read it, and never got around to it. I find that balancing reading new books and old books gets to be tough sometimes. It seems like there are always new books coming out that I feel compelled to read, but at the same time there are so many classics that I still haven't touched. It pisses me off that I didn't become enthusiastic about reading until much later in life. If I had started when I was a kid I would be miles ahead right now.



This is why I don't understand all of these parents who refuse to allow their kids to read any of the Harry Potter books. You've got a kid who is ASKING to read books that are upwards of 700 - 800 pages, and you tell them no because you heard that they deal with witch-craft. That has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. I wish so much that there would have been a series of books (hell, even one book) that I would have wanted to read that badly when I was a kid. If I had fallen in love with reading then, who knows how different things may be for me now.



I promise if I had read On the Road and Howl when I was 15 rather than when I was 20, things would be a bit different for me today. That's not to say that I would have left my family to jump a train and head to New York or Denver, but the books you read growing up have a big influence on the type of person you turn out to be (I think they do anyway) and had I been exposed to more books in my early years, who knows what would be different.



Of course, I could have become a cult leader and be in an institution by now following that very same logic, so maybe things turned out ok the way that they happened. I'll just have to do lots of catching up now.



Speaking of which, I'm going to wrap this up so that I can get some reading done.