I’m currently in book reading mode. This happens to me every 5 or 9 years. I suddenly want to read everything, go back to school and watch every movie or documentary on the subject I’m suddenly obsessed with. It’s pretty fun to spend every free moment reading and thinking about reading, and listening to books in the car and on my phone. I’m obsessed.
This time it is Western American Literature and Western American History.
I should say, this time and last time I got obsessed with every writer writing in the late 19th and early 20th Century. I read master theises, I read research and subscribed to journals. I go down associated subjects’ rabbit holes. It’s so fun.
Warning: this is not really related to the outdoors but I do have a triathlon analogy coming up. Read on, please.
I’m reading and buying books from DeVoto, american history scholars, railroads, authors writing about this time period and text books about these subjects. What is interesting to me as I follow link to link, reading about writers and historians and the transcontinental railroad, I see a book about a man writing about the Sonoran Desert. And I remember his name. I read his book when I was living in Tucson and the Sonoran Desert. I remember on my blogspot blog I wrote about the book, and about him.
The irony in the story below is about obsessions and getting so into a subject that it generates a book, a story or a movie – or changes your life.
I dream of being a scholar, professional athlete, world traveler. The closest I can come to realizing a dream is to: read everything, do the work, talk to people. The key to success in any enterprise.
But I digress. Here is the story I wrote January 2014 about a book I loved.
I am reading The Fallen Sky An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. And while, I am no scientist and I know nothing about meteors and meteorites, it is a really interesting book. What hooks me is how the author personalizes a story about the people who are obsessed with meteorites. The author, Christopher Cokinos, is searching for those who are searching for meteors; he is hunting the obsessive types.
I know that type well.
For I am obsessed with triathlon.
I am endlessly fascinated by fellow-obsessed triathletes. I want to know what drives them, what makes them get up in the morning and train, then go to work, and train again. But I’m also obsessed with the west and western writers and people who chose to live in the west.
Maybe my next book needs to be about obsessed nature writers who are triathletes and live in the west.
I am reading five books right now and The Fallen Sky is my number one. I can’t seem to put it down. This is my favorite passage so far. As you read it think of what you are searching for, the journeys you have been on and what you found, and the people you met:
“Whether someone wishes to possess a meteorite to sell it or to crack one open in a laboratory for discovery, the meteorite must first be found or hunted. Which often means you have to be willing to go where the meteorites are ….such journeys have impressed on me that wonder-whether from discovering a geological rarity or tracking down a hidden history or finding a lover – is not as pristine a feeling as some would think. I found that mine was a journey into wonder and its costs. Along the way, I bore changes in my life and realized that I was hunting the lives of the meteorite hunters – not just the stones themselves-and I began to understand these strangers’ lives better when I accepted my own. Quests, after all, can come at a very high price….As to the meteorite clan, they’re a complicated, colorful lot.” (4)
Yes, quests come at a cost and triathletes sure are a colorful bunch.
It’s like the osprey folks. They are obsessed about finding osprey. The obsessed are everywhere.
I’m going to keep reading The Fallen Sky and learn about shooting stars and crazy people who are endlessly fascinated by them, to understand my own obsessions.