Read All About It

It’s hard to decide between music and reading. I probably do spend more time on reading in its broad sense. What do I mean by “broad sense.” Well, perhaps you could argue that listening to audiobooks, podcasts and even watching video falls into the broad category of reading. For example, I’m currently listening to 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year on Spotify, but I’m taking in the same information that I might get if I were reading a book or watching a documentary. Audiobooks are quite relaxing, but sometimes I fall asleep or my mind wanders. Perhaps it’s also useful to have the physical or electronic book for reference. But then again, I don’t need to know everything about 1971 😀.

Reading Subjects

• Bible-related books
  • I’ve always had an interest in the intellectual side of evangelicalism. I enjoy reading systematic theology, church history, Bible commentaries etc. Again, the formats vary. I probably spend more time listening to audiobooks and podcasts than reading. I list some of my favourite audio resources on my Recommended Audio Resources post. I often go back and re-read or re-listen to books. In some ways, it’s almost like listening to music. It just lifts my spirits, even if I’m not hearing anything particularly new.
• Music books
  • I like pop biographies. I think that the first biographical books that I ever bought was a Beatles book back around 1975. I still have it around the house, but I also saw it on the World Radio History site, which hosts a lot of old pop and rock magazines. I was big into all that back in the 1970s. It always fascinates me how difficult the lives of rock stars are. Even apart from all the horrific consequences of drugs, financial scams etc., so much of their work was mundane. We got a lot more pleasure listening to their music than they got making it. I dreamt about being a pop star, but maybe I should thank God for unanswered prayers 😀.
• Travel books
  • I’m very much an armchair traveler. I mentioned a few times on this blog that I virtually visit a different country every day. I generally do this on YouTube, but I do have travel books around the house.
• Transport books
  • From an early age I enjoyed going to the airport and viewing aircraft. Later it was trains and buses. So, I have a good many books on trains on my bookshelf. I sometimes wonder what attracts me to trains. Maybe, somewhere in our minds, we classify them as animals. I certainly remember viewing cars, vans, lorries and buses as a young child and almost thinking that they had faces and personalities. Some were pleasant and some were scary. I was especially scared of the Austin FFK.
    
    Near the beginning of the Bible, Adam names the animals. From a scientific perspective, it makes sense to classify things. So, maybe we get a dopamine fix from classifying transport vehicles 😀. And for many, there’s probably a social dimension with any kind of hobby – even train spotting. But I never really did that.

I have all sorts of other books around the house, mainly non-fiction. I do remember reading many classic novels in my youth. I made several attempts at reading modern fiction, but I never stuck with it.

Another hobby that’s been quite compelling over the last few years is taking every month of my life and noting what I can remember. I list the current songs, films, news events, and TV shows. Now, I’ve even gone backwards to create listings of every year since the beginning of the 20th century. And I’ve always enjoyed creating chronologies of history, particularly church history. You get a lot of these online, but it’s fun to create your own too. For all this, I use Google Sites, but I don’t make any personal stuff available online.

And I play computer games. I particularly enjoy transport simulators such as Train Simulator and music games such as Rocksmith and Yousician. And since 2019, I’ve played various games on my Meta Oculus. In virtual reality (VR), I generally play gentle games that don’t involve a lot of movement that would make you feel an element of motion sickness. But there are a good few well-designed games, such as Walkabout Minigolf, Real VR Fishing, and Demeo. And you can watch YouTube in immersive environments such as cinemas and apartments using Bigscreen Beta.

Anyway, I always like to end with a couple of hymns. I can’t think of any hymns on the theme of reading, but there are surely some about the Bible. So here goes: