If you ask that question, I suspect you’ve already decided against it.

But for a few of us, not reading would be intellectual and spiritual prison. Complete incarceration.

As is my pattern, I have deviated a bit from my regimen I designed.

Some writers came into my life that I thought I felt I had to read early this year. And so, my ‘scheduled’ books got pushed to the right a bit.

But I’m still on track.

So far in 2023, I’ve fallen in love (again for some volumes … like Melville’s masterpiece and, of course, one of my “bromances,” Charles Dickens) with certain books/stories/plays/poems, but here’s a glimpse at some of those I’ve been through in January 2023:

1. Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
2. Harry Crews’ The Mulching of America
3. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
4. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
5. Collection: The Greatest Stories of Anton Chekhov
6. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger
7. Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris
8. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel
9. Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (still reading)
10. Ligonier Ministries: A Field Guide On False Teaching

I’m working through Hawthorne’s oeuvre, as well as some of my war stories and books about soldiers and war, of which I never seem to tire, especially WWI and Vietnam, two wars where you could smell your ‘enemy’ and see his pupils.

If you’re a reader, I know we’re the minority, but people remember Plato, Calvin, and Shakespeare. They don’t remember who’s trending on the world wide dread, I mean, web. Sorry, not sorry.

Press on, bibliophiles.

The written word abides.