The Oldies

I don't know what it is about me and OLD BOOKS lately, but really... I have some kind of strange hankering after the oldies!
Just last evening I finished reading Saul Bellow's (1964) Herzog.
If I wasn't so tired right now from a grueling day at work, a day when I was literally dreaming of Old Milwaukee [and I don't mean the city]... what I'm trying to say is if I wasn't so tired and half-drunk right now, I would write a real essay about this Herzog book.
Seriously, the book was fantastic.
But I couldn't sleep very well last night.
I kept getting out of bed and eating stuff, and I also browsed my bookshelves, checking out all the wonderful unread stuff that lurks in there.
The above picture reveals just one wall of my apartment!
I have a lot of old books. One of my Tolstoy volumes has a publication date of 1885.
You can't have that one. Even after I'm dead.
There's something about that old...... oldness, that I am really enjoying lately, in my reading.

So, last night, while eating a severely late-night casserole, I picked out this little novel by William Golding, The Spire, and started reading it.
So far so good! Quite in"spire"-ing!
[I need sleep. Or another beer maybe....]
All I really know about Golding is that I really loved his debut novel, Lord of The Flies.
As I sat on the poofy chair at Starbucks after work tonight, I noticed that The Spire was also first published in 1964, like Herzog.
Wow, back then I was but a mere lad of one! As in, one year old.
And with Lord of The Flies. I was like MINUS nine-years-old.
I just think it is neat sometimes, reading good stuff like this [Golding also a Nobel-Prizer, like Bellow] to stop and realize that these words have been in print my entire lifetime. Something neat about just now, in my dotage, getting to them.
Having this many books in one's place -- it sometimes feels like living in a Library.
And I like that.

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