Cairns, Queensland
In the last few months, I have started reading fiction again, and I’m enjoying it.
I have read all my life. I read academic literature when I was at university, both as an undergraduate, in the late 70s and then more recently as a postgrad student. In completing my PhD, I must have read thousands of journal articles. At work, it was professional reading. Oh, the joy of reading an Accounting Standard or recent tax case!
In my leisure, I have also read, but until recently, it has mainly been non-fiction and, as a result, often hard to read. I also read the papers and between my favourite person and I, we have a number of subscriptions to online sites. A couple of these are The Free Press, which I have referred to in earlier posts. Although The Free Press is mainly focused on current affairs, it also offers regular pieces on literature and music, as does another of our subscriptions, Quillette.
As part of a rethink on ‘What’s Next’, I decided to change direction with my reading. I decided reading for pleasure might be a good way to spend some time and decided to move away from non-fiction. The rethink was also a function of my decision to unburden myself from the constant negative and destructive forces that seem at play in our world. It had become so easy to ‘doomscroll’ and I decided that I no longer wanted to succumb to it. I haven’t been wholly successful in this endeavour, but I’m well progressed.