On Books

Have you ever read something that truly surprised you – something so far off your radar that you actually thought about it long after you read it? I had just such an occasion reading Wings of Madness recently. It was an intriguing biographical and historical story surrounding something that we are all more than familiar with … flight – specifically, the beginning of flight! The biographical subject rubbed shoulders with many notables with whom we are so familiar: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Pierpont Langley, Gustave Eiffel, Theodore Roosevelt as well as the Cartiers, the Rothschilds and Princess Isabelle. Yet this is a man who was unknown to me, absent from the histories I have read and studied. He was a Brazilian national who spent most of his life in Paris and was on the very public forefront of man’s venture into the realm of birds at the same time as Orville and Wilbur Wright, who, in stark contrast, were keeping their aeronautical developments quite secret. His name is Alberto Santos-Dumont.

Santos-Dumont is revered in the country of his birth, Brazil, and many there hold that the homage of first in flight should belong to him. I think it curious that, I feel safe in saying, most of the people in this country have never heard of this shy, eccentric personality.

I kept waiting for the book to become dry and overly factual – a sure antidote for insomnia for me; however, dryness never happened. The book did plod along in a few places and the very nature of the subject would seem to dictate a yawn, but the author, Paul Hoffman, just kept drawing me in further and further. That I’m even writing about it here is a surprise, but I felt it worth sharing.

I am making a conscious effort to read through the embarrassing amount of books that we’ve collected over the years. Granted two thirds of the books are how-to books and such, but it’s the volumes of fiction and non-fiction that I am trying to claim. Books just seem to collect on our shelves like dust and are often abandoned after acquisition; overwhelming in their weight and noticed only upon moving. Ironically, the re-claiming began during a week long bed rest in a Vicodin haze after pulling my back out moving boxes of said books. It has been interesting and enlightening to go to a shelf and pick a half a dozen books and just read them through, not thinking about "what's next". I’m finding while reading I’m remembering why I chose a book to begin with, be it subject, author or both. Although there have been some exceptions to the moratorium on “new” books over the last 13 months, in the main it has been a worthy endeavor to visit our own library instead of another worm’s shelves. Equally satisfying is keeping a list of what I have read, therefore eliminating the dependence on a disgustingly shallow short-term memory pool that is evaporating by the day.

Happy reading!