Monkeying About With The Reading List - 9/16/2014

  [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/8/2025] 

I have two activities here at Fort Dix FCI to keep me sane. My job in landscaping amounts to nothing more than makework. We have approximately 52 men on our roster and 6 shovels, 6 metal rakes, 6 spades, and 2 wheelbarrows. And the rains hit today - so not doing anything there at all. Come, winter, I shall spend more time typing than landscaping. Keeping my sanity feels imperative here and now.

My Bureau of Prisons case manager has no plans on how to reintegrate me into society. That 151 months in prison might have been overkill cannot even be thought by the government officials overseeing my imprisonment. Saying such a thing would be heresy exceeding Luther's, and Nietzsche's. So I do need to keep writing and reading. The writing and reading give me purpose here.

While reading Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, my mind kept going to my own writing. The fiction mostly, but also this journal, these notes. Yes, I had this feeling somewhat while reading The Brothers Karamazov, but Dostoevsky's style did not taunt me the way Mantel's taunted me to get back to work. Besides, I had set today - my commissary day - for getting typewriter cartridges. My hiatus has come to an end. That thought prodded me through Mantel's novel.

Nick Lowe's "Breaking Glass" (or is it "Sound of Breaking Glass"?) is on the radio right now. It still sounds good.

The writing makes me feel I am doing something useful. I can only spend so much time here recollecting my sins - I have no other means of atoning for them than my writing. If I can sell them, then maybe I will not be living on the dole, or on the street, in 2022.

The reading list does seem a bit harder to justify. Mom once took away my books (hid some of them from her) when I was somewhere between 8 and 10. She thought I was reading too much. It may be then I began discounting fiction and privileging non-fiction. The only book I recall from that period is one of C.S. Forester's Hornblower books. I still had that when I got arrested. The reading list contains only fiction.

The list has problems. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon apparently disappeared [from the prison leisure library, sch 6/12/2025] the same as did Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Since Morrison's Beloved is already on the list, I substituted Ian McEwan, who I have heard good things of but not read (and we have a copy in the prison's leisure library!) Maybe I can get a copy sent in of Song of Solomon.

I found a duplicate on the list, just recently. Two entries for The Handmaid's Tale. I decided to read Kate Chopin, instead.

I also dropped The Count of Monte Cristo. It is huge. I need to get to my writing. I swapped in a Richard Ford novel. I have heard of him; Joel C read one of his novels and liked him. I do not think I can learn much from Dumas.

Because of the writing, I decided to put off War and Peace. I did pick up Latin Literature (penguin Classic; Michael Grant, ed; 1978) with the thought of going back to Tolstoy. Now, I will do the Romans, and then Ralph Ellison paired with Lord of the Flies, then go to I, Claudius and Howard's End. I will pair Maus now with War and Peace. I may not clear out the locker this way, but I will work out the reading list. I will go back to War and Peace when I get the stories done for "Only The Dead and The Dying", or I run out of typing supplies.

By having goals and purpose, I avoid my time imprisoned doing me instead of me doing my time. Perhaps, I will emerge from here without my brains being addled, capable of a better life than the one I ruined. Why do I think the BOP would disapprove of my plans?

sch