Read

In my last post, I discussed the value of learning to play a musical instrument.

This time I discuss the value of reading.

In a nutshell, I suggest reading anything and everything that interests you, from the backs of cereal boxes to the classics.

I won't go so far as to say you can skip school and get a complete education by reading (especially if you stop with the backs of cereal boxes). But you can come awfully close.

And I haven't even mentioned cultural literacy yet.

There's more to cultural literacy -- the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions, and knowledge that creates and constitutes a culture -- than reading. But reading makes up the major part of it.

Cultural literacy covers everything from being familiar with "To thine own self be true" (Shakespeare's Hamlet) to recognizing the origins of "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (the Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer on the test of the first atomic bomb). And we might as well throw in "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (Hint: Rhett said it to Scarlett.)

Knowing these things marks you as well-bred in sophisticated society. Given that you probably want to be -- and to be considered -- worldly and well-educated, you have to read, read, and then read some more.

I've been prowling around the Internet checking out what others have to say about books that lead to culturally literacy. I don't claim to have come up with the definitive list. But I'll name some of the books with which I'm familiar. Pick a few that you haven't read and give them a shot.

I'm not listing them in any particular order, and you might not enjoy reading all of them. That's okay. It's a quirky list, but it's all mine.

Feel free to add your own suggestions in a comment on this post.

Here's my list:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Earl Stanley Gardner
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Holy Bible: King James Version, multiple authors
To Serve Them All My Days by R.L. Delderfield
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (published in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)
The Odyssey by Homer
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Stand by Stephen King
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Enjoy!

Life's little lessons

What is it with us old people and this desire we have to pass on life lessons to the young?

I'm in my seventieth year. I don't have to stretch the definition of "old" to qualify as a member of the class. Wisdom? I'm not claiming a bit of it. I can promise you that wisdom in no way piles up as the years accumulate. Experience? That does pile up -- the good and the bad.

I say this as preamble to the first in a series of occasional posts that are aimed at the young ones in the family. My experience has taught me that certain roads taken in my youth turned out to have a profound impact on my life.

For the most part, this will probably be an exercise in futility.

Why? Because, dear reader, it's futile to try to influence another's life. Just as trying to teach a pig to sing wastes your time and annoys the hell out of the pig.

Nevertheless ...

Music will bring you joy in unexpected ways.

I began to learn that lesson in, I believe, 2nd grade. I was introduced to the tonette.

Tonettes are cheap, plastic wind instruments. The fingering is simple, and they are easy to play. They were incorporated into American classrooms in the late 1930s as a pre-band or -orchestra instrument. I think the first song we learned to play in the late 1940s was "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." At first, we must have created a disagreeable and discordant sound.

But we learned to play the thing, some of us better than others. A year later we learned the rudiments of playing an autoharp. By 5th grade, I was taking violin lessons from the visiting music teacher at Helen Dickinson Elementary. Still later, at East End Junior High in Richmond, I took up the bass fiddle and played in the school's orchestra.

I stopped playing music in high school. There was no orchestra at Henrico's Hermitage High School. (Instead, there was a marching band. Bass fiddles just don't work well in a marching band.)

So what part did the tonette, the autoharp, the violin and the bass fiddle play in my life?

They taught me about rhythm -- from the rhythm of rock and roll music to the rhythm of Bach and Beethoven and on to the unusual rhythms of Dave Brubeck's music.

They taught me to hear and appreciate the rhythm of the falling rain, the rhythm of a horse's hoofbeats and the rhythm of slow dancing when the lights are low.

I learned to hear the rhythm of verbal expression, the cadence of writers from Shakespeare to Harper Lee, the simple, throbbing beauty of a perfect sentence.

Even today, I feel life's rhythms deep in my bones.

The rhythm of music learned early and embedded acutely in one's brain will emerge at some point, often in a way utterly unrelated to music.

I, for example, became a writer.

Exercising and socializing

Today the topics ranged from Studebakers to Vietnamese restaurants. As always, I learned something.

I enjoy my daily fitness class at the Richmond Jewish Community Center. It's preserving my mobility, strengthening my coordination, improving my balance and making me feel good.

But I enjoy the social aspect that follows just as much.

After our 30 minutes of aerobics, 15 minutes of handweights and 15 minutes of stretching, many of us gather in comfortable chairs adjacent to the café to relax and talk.

About half of us are Jewish, and half are Christian. I've learned a lot about Jewish customs and practices -- especially with the recent Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot holidays -- and I've explained a lot about Christian holidays and observances. But those are merely occasional topics of conversation.

More often we talk about restaurants (because we're usually hungry after an hour of exercise), movies (because of which I've seen a few good films I never would have otherwise noticed), good television programs (we're all devoted to "Masterpiece Theater" on Sunday nights), foreign travel (two people from the class are in Istanbul this week) and even politics (Eric Cantor might be Jewish, but he won't find many fans in our group).

It's an eclectic gathering. There's a woman who spent her career teaching Spanish at the University of Richmond and another who spent her career at Columbia University in New York, a man who ran a successful business in Richmond for four decades, a woman who immigrated from England (today the conversation briefly turned to the Wimpy Burgers chain in the U.K.), and a man who grew up in an apartment above his father's candy store in northern New Jersey in the 1930s.

As far as I know, I'm the only Richmond native in the group. I'm the go-to guy on Richmond history and why things are they way they are here. (Lord knows I hope I'm getting it right.)

The class meets at 10:30 Monday through Friday. Most of us are in our 60s and 70s, with a few who are in their 30s and 40s and another few who are in their 80s. Many of us are retired.

Of those of us who socialize after class, I am usually the youngest (I just turned 69).

Which brings me to my point.

In many other social situations, I'm the oldest.

So it's good to be able to socialize with people whose memories go back as far -- and even farther -- than mine.

Among other advantages, it means we don't have to explain what a rumble seat was.