The water way

The theme at Goat Rope lately is books, specifically the 10 books that had the biggest impact on me at different points in my life (whether I liked them at the time or not), starting from the beginning.

Here's the rundown so far: 1. The Bible; 2. The Book of Common Prayer; 3. Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; 4. The Lord of the Rings. Next up is...

5. The Tao Te Ching. I come by an interest in things Chinese honestly. My grandfather lived there for years and my father was born there. I grew up around artifacts of that visit, including a bronze Buddha still in my possession.

My fascination only increased when I became interested in martial arts as a kid but we were pretty poor. That mean we couldn't afford pricey tae kwon do schools that charged an arm and a leg and taught impractical techniques. I guess poverty has its good points.

It was a few years before we found a traditional Japanese style dojo, but in the meantime I read everything I could get my hands on about it, including the religions and philosophies that influenced the arts, which is where I first learned about Taoism.

I can't remember how old I was when I got my first copy of the Tao Te Ching, a classic attributed to Lao Tzu a few centuries before Christ but that one stuck. I've written about it often here (search box in upper left corner for more) and can't say enough. It is by far the wisest and most practical book I've ever read and one that I wish everyone interested in making the world a little less nasty would check out.

Thanks for the orcs

El Cabrero is serving a two week stint in the reserve army of the unemployed. Blog posts during this period were prepared in advance and won't have links or comments about current events.

The theme for this period is my top 10 countdown of books that hit me hardest growing up, in chronological order. So far Book #1 was the Bible; Book #2 was The Book of Common Prayer; Book #3 was The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Book #4 is....

The Lord of the Rings (and I guess The Hobbit too). I fessed up a while back to being an occasional Tolkien dork. I stumbled onto these books when I was in junior high and visiting my brother at Christmas when he lived in Florida. One of his roommates had these odd looking paperbacks on a shelf and I was intrigued. I figured out which one was first and then it was down the rabbit hole.

When I finally finished the series some weeks later, I was depressed, believing that I'd never read anything that good again. What can I say? I was in eighth grade.

That didn't turn out to be true but the times I've been that absorbed in any book have been few and far between.

Ironically, it was only as an adult--and after trying to keep this or that Dark Lord wannabe from gaining total power--that I came to see it as a work of realism.

On the salutary effect of getting the hell scared out of you as a kid

This week and next El Cabrero is officially furloughed. Goat Rope will appear regularly but the posts were prepared in advance and won't have links or comments about current events.

I'm filling up the time these days by blogging about the top 10 books that have influenced me from childhood through early adulthood in basically chronological order. What would be on your list?

Book #1 was the Bible and Book #2 was the Book of Common Prayer (it's an Episcopal thing). Book #3 is...

Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I've mentioned before in this blog how my late father used to read those to me when I was a little kid--and how they scared the bejesus out of me. It didn't help that my older brother used to get on the phone and pretend to call the Plutonian shore and tell the Raven to come get his little brother Ricky...

It is fun to be a little scared when you're a kid and I ate that stuff up. Besides, where else will you find a phrase like this:

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

Why us talk so pretty

1549 version.

I'm filling up the time by blogging about the top 10 books that have had the biggest impact on me growing up in more or less chronological order. Book #1, discussed yesterday, was the Bible.

Book #2 is like unto it. I'm referring to The Book of Common Prayer, which kind of goes with the territory of being raised Episcopal. Again, growing up in that tradition meant that while we were sprinkled in baptism, we were immersed in the language of the prayer book, which goes back to (and even pre-dates) Elizabethan English.

When I was a kid, we used the 1928 version, which is chock full of all kinds of ornate and colorful language. If you want to see what the English language can do when it wants to, that's not a bad place to check. Here's just one example. In one liturgy, we didn't just repent of our sins, we acknowledged and bewailed our manifold sins and wickedness.

An awful lot of writers come from that religious tradition (did someone say Shakespeare?). I have no way of proving this, but I wouldn't be surprised if being immersed in that kind of liturgical language had something to do with it.

(El Cabrero is officially unemployed this week and next. That means that posts will continue to appear here but were prepared in advance and will not have links or comments about current events.).

A good book

The theme for this little stretch is about the top 10 books that have had the biggest impact on me growing up, in chronological order.


This probably is no surprise but book #1 is...The Bible.

I was raised in the Episcopal Church, to which I am still more or less attached. I wasn't always (or even usually) ((or maybe ever)) excited about going to church as a kid, but some of it must have stuck.

There is a vicious rumor out there that I have made it my mission in life to correct. That rumor is that Episcopalians don't read the Bible. In fact, we do--just in case we ever go on Jeopardy.

But seriously, even though Episcopalians aren't big on literalism, a good chunk of a typical service consists of readings from the Bible. This usually involves a psalm, another reading from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, a reading from one of the gospels and one from the epistles. So even if you don't read it, you wind up hearing a lot of it.

I wound up reading it too and have made it all the way through several times, some parts more often than others. And I've kept picking it up even when I wasn't particularly religious. It really is a great book--more accurately, collection of books--and it's too bad that so many people in this country claim to believe every word literally but know very little about it.

Would that the reverse were the case...

NOTE: El Cabrero is officially unemployed this week and next week, so these posts have been prepared in advance and won't contain links or comments about current events.

Book em

El Cabrero is furloughed for the next two weeks. However, feel no fret. Goat Rope will continue to appear on its regular schedule although posts will be prepared in advance and will appear without links or comments about current events.

I thought a good way of killing a few days blogging might be to talk about books. It might be fun to come up with a top 10 list of the books. I hope that by doing that, it might encourage you, Gentle Reader, to do the same.

Here's the method I'm going to use. Rather than writing about favorite books or even books I agree with, I'm going to focus on those books that had the biggest impact on me growing up in more or less chronological order up to around age 20.

So what would be on your list? Stay tuned for mine...

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