Four Fiction Selections for October

The month of October is right around the corner and in preparation for Spooky Season, I have composed (or exhumed and reanimated) four fiction stories in honor of the shorter days and longer nights. I’ve repurposed an older, long unused blog site and my short fiction will be available there. 

Rather than spreading myself thin trying to do both essays and short stories, therefore, I will only be sharing short fiction for October. In November, I will return to posting my weekly essays. If short stories aren't your thing, please take the opportunity to read past essays on the Dave Rambles On site. The previous months and years (including some for older early attempts at essays) are archived on the right side of the main page.

The first of the tales of terror will be available next week. I will supply a link for each of the remaining stories each Thursday, as usual in October. As well as a social media post for my followers there.

Each story is a little different. None of these are set in Hantonville, the county seat of Talbot County, where many of my other, older short fiction takes place. Certainly, none of these are for the faint of heart but they stop short at being overtly terrifying, I hope. 

To give you full autonomy in your choice to read or not read, I am supplying brief summaries below. 

First up is Crimson Rain. A young woman must confront a terrifying intruder who turns out to be more than she bargained for.

Next is The Belknap Route. A truck driver's journey through a fog-shrouded mountain road takes a terrifying turn.

The third selection is Pond Fishing. Two ragged friends embark on a seemingly ordinary fishing trip at an abandoned business property pond, but their peaceful outing descends into a nightmare as they discover trespassing has serious consequences.

Finally, in time for Halloween, Briar Moon. A patient's hypnotherapy sessions take a sinister turn as he unravels a horrifying truth about his own identity.

I hope they enhance the spirit of Fall for you.

Enjoy!

A Ban a Minute

For years, each September, I put out a display educating and alerting public library users to Banned Books Week, which is an annual program conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) to help spread awareness about the harm of banning books. Each year, I set up a three-ring binder with an updated list of all the books that were banned or challenged the previous year. My binder has 10 years of pages of this kind. Still, this year, I’m hesitant to draw attention to the display and even more reluctant to overtly celebrate all the different possible displays of authors who are LGBTQ+, people of color or authors that otherwise challenge so-called “traditional values” with their fiction. I now have to face the terrifying possibility that doing so could make our library and staff a target for lunatics.

We librarians work hard to provide access to all books, by the way; unfettered and open access to every kind of book, whether controversial or not, by authors of all kinds regardless if they have been challenged or banned in other places. I’m very careful to make sure that our young people can access what they want to read and they know that they can ask us and we will go get a book for them if they’re uncomfortable. I just feel like putting out a display is drawing fire by proclaiming openly to the powers of hate that we know they’re there. Right now, the cultural climate is so tense, poking them by displaying banned books seems like a way to get a small cadre of bigots in our branch, scoping through our collection and screaming at librarians. Five years ago, it would have felt far-fetched to think this. When I started in this position, I couldn’t have imagined that scenario outside of a YA dystopian series like The Hunger Games. 

Today, it is a common reality.

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Tiny little groups of rabid extremists, usually claiming to be Christian or evangelical, but always associated with far-right political ideology, have bitten and torn public libraries to shreds around our country for daring to put books in their collections that they hate. Directors have been fired or had to resign, staff members have been targeted and threatened. One colleague at a neighboring library system had to endure foaming diatribes directed at them while they stood watch over a collection that was paid for by the county, state, and some federal funds, all because the screaming goon heard a rumor that one of the titles in that collection had something about people who were “Gay”. Would-be book banners lose their minds, cause a stink and ruin people’s lives over the most trivial content in books and they regularly claim their buffoonery is ‘for the kids’. Librarians and probably some local officials, now regularly expect mishegoss. So common has the run on library young adult and children’s collections been by mindless (and probably illiterate) goons, primarily in red states and counties, that some boards of trustees have ratified new procedures to minimize the damage when a patron complains.

In some of these county library systems, certain individuals with strong anti-literacy ideas get themselves elected to the board and brutalize the other members until they step down, allowing them to form small locally powerful boards that can completely control the library’s functions. The odd thing is, of course, that not one of them has any sense of how a library works. Soon enough, people stop coming to the library, because the books they want to read are no longer available and because the staff is so broken and the system so marred by the sad misuse by imbeciles that the libraries have to downsize or close. It is happening now. This is not a drill.

The motivation to ‘take control’ of libraries has become the final wretched tool in the belt of the kind of people who think that their morality is the only kind any of us need. They also think that anyone who doesn’t worship or marry the way they do is an abomination. They don’t want the children in a community to see others like them when they read books. They don’t want them to know about the Civil War, slavery or that there are people out there who do not define themselves by one or another gender. If the kids learn about those things, they cannot be indoctrinated and become mental thralls.

These anti-book ‘mammals’ have made arguments that there are books in the children’s collections with ‘pornographic’ content and that children can access these books. This is not the case, nor has it ever been, but book banners have never been willing to actually go see for themselves. They only make an assumption based on a social media post or the hearsay of some other lunatic.  

One group, unironically calling itself ‘moms for liberty’ (the capitalization is removed out of spite by the author) claimed that there were such books in a library in a Florida library system near where one of my former bosses worked as director. People lost their collective minds, only to find that the book was a parent’s guide to speak to children about their bodies and things like love and gender and so on. The real problem was—you cannot make this kind of lunacy up—the book made the case that love is love. The mom group called this unacceptable. The head of the youth services department lost their job and was harassed until they moved to another state. I presume they won’t work in the library profession ever again.

This was just one book in one library. These attacks are happening all over the country.

Intellectual liberty and freedom of access were once prized in America. Personal liberty was protected and treasured. Now, we have goons running all over, just looking for something to be offended by, so they can remove other people’s rights. 

In the meantime, one of the founding members of that mom group was caught having a ‘polyamorous’ affair and admitted that it wasn’t unusual behavior for her. So much for ‘family values’. The Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has attended and verbally supported the mom group, has been outspoken about passing legislation to limit and censor library collections and has claimed that some people ‘just need killing’. These are just a few examples. 

Most of the groups are all intent on ‘protecting the kids’, or so they say, but what they really want to do is force their dogmatic ideologies on the rest of us. Parents are able to decide what’s right for their children to read, but these groups are not interested in that fact. They want to stop access to what they hate. The thought of a young teen going to the library, finding a book and discovering that their life is changed because they read about another young person who is like them, is enough to cause many of these so-called Americans to blow a gasket. 

My patience—and that of many in my profession—for ‘other people’s views’ on books is at its lowest ebb, generally, but actively attacking libraries because someone might read about something you don’t want them to is beyond the frozen limit, to me. I have been an advocate for stronger punishments for those who attempt to destroy library collections, even by banning them. If it was up to me, these people who decide they hate other people reading books ought to be forced to listen to readings of the books they hate in public until they expire from shame. It would probably take forever. If they had normal human responses, they would not try to ban books.

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The ideology behind banning books comes from a strange obsession with sex and other people’s love lives. I learned early on that the Christian preoccupation with sex and sexuality was far more deviant than anything they purported to be “against”. The evangelical community had two regular sermon topics each year. One was tithing (begging members to give ten percent of their income for running the church) and the other was homosexuality. The more vehemently they preached against it, I later learned, the more likely they were participating in it. This proved true both at my home church and later when I briefly converted to Catholicism. While the latter was blaming the Harry Potter craze for spreading “black magic” it failed to cover up a horrifying series of child sexual assaults that will blemish its reputation forever. In the former situation, our preacher actively trounced adulterers as often as possible. I used to feel bad for the people in the front pews who were spittle-flecked at the end of the services. He was caught having an affair with a woman twenty years his junior while his wife was being treated for lupus. He had to move to Alaska to get away from the bad press. 

How loudly did Jerry Falwell Junior denounce sexual depravity, only to find that he and his wife regularly made sport with a pool boy? It happens again and again. To name a sexual activity is to discover that a former preacher or politician who came out strongly against it in public was later caught ‘in flagrante delicto’.  In other words, the more trenchant certain of these dogmas become against a certain kind of lifestyle, which they consider ‘sinful’, the more likely it is that they are participating in that lifestyle in secret. 

The Southern Baptist Council of churches recently faced a shattering series of reports in which it couldn’t begin to catalog the horrific abuses of children, females, males in all kinds of depraved sins that would make a modern adult movie producer retch. Rather than shuttering their churches or closing the entire organization in shame, they put new ‘preachers’ into those churches and prevented more information from being made public to ‘protect the families involved’. Jesus, in Luke says, “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Still they appear to be oblivious to the beam in their own eye.

Most, if not all of the revulsion from ecclesiastical groups about books at the library is a matter of choosing to insinuate oneself into other people’s lives. They want everyone to be under their thumb, but not because they want the world to be without sin, as they claim, but because they want the freedom to tell others how to live. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his groundbreaking God is Not Great, the puritans didn’t come to America to be free from persecution so much as to be free to persecute. Strong puritanical and Calvinist obsession with sex remains a very big problem in our country. If it continues to gain ground, we will all be forced to pretend to worship whether we want to or not.

At base, therefore, the distal cause of anti book sentiments is directly related to a widespread frontier worldview based on first century desert religions that are themselves only partially understood. The modern proponents of book banning are almost always associated with faith-based organizations.

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Libraries are a crucial battleground in the relentless assault on our rights. A small, toxic faction of hypocrites, miscreants, and self-righteous individuals is determined to strip away freedoms and impose their narrow beliefs on everyone else. This mindset fuels the pro-life movement and the anti-immigration agenda, both rooted in racism, sexism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and a twisted obsession with racial purity. The founders and financiers of these groups often represent the very worst of humanity, wielding their wealth to shape a world they can dominate. Their champions are despicable figures, yet they somehow garner support.

Banned Books Week has evolved from a rare response to ignorance into a critical flashpoint in our struggle to preserve democracy. It has grown from an annual to a daily reality.  Libraries are essential for fostering liberty, free inquiry and access to diverse ideas—bulwarks against authoritarianism. You don’t have to like every book on our shelves or even agree with its content; many who seek to ban books don’t bother reading them at all. What matters is defending the right to access information, as it is vital for safeguarding your freedoms. If we don’t stand up against this tide of censorship, we risk losing everything we hold dear.

Moving On Down

In 2021, in the aftermath of his serious cardiac procedure and grueling recovery, our father’s children began to pester him to depart his home and get a place all on one level. Pops needed time to heal properly. Going up and down flights of steps in his two-story house (or down to his basement to do laundry) was not going to aid his recuperation. It was also murdering his already replaced knees. But, he was dead set against selling his house and he stubbornly, flatly refused to depart for easier one-level living. He just put his ears back and made do until he was well enough to try to return to his daily routine. 

Then, out of nowhere this past mid-summer, he alerted us that he had found someone to buy his house and that, at long last, he would be moving into an apartment a few blocks away. We reeled a bit, especially since it all happened so suddenly. We were naturally awash with concern that he had been scammed or was being taken in a ploy. It happens to elderly people all the time. He gruffly reminded us that he was not a dupe and stolidly went on with his plan. Pop Bare is, if nothing else, headstrong.

In just a few weeks, the Old Man will transition from a homeowner to a renter. He only ever rented briefly once before in the time since he arrived home from the Army in 1963, and that was when he was waiting for contractors to finish building a previous house. Otherwise, Pop Bare has owned his own home(s) in one form or another for sixty years. That’s a long time to get used to possessing and controlling one's property and domicile.

As I mowed and tended our grounds the other weekend, I mulled over what it would be like to climb down from owning our home and property and descend into the weird and possibly scary realm of renting. I didn’t like the way it made me feel even just as a mental experiment. 

I have always assumed that at some point we would move, maybe to a smaller house, more suited to just the two of us on a bit of land where I could raise bees and Micki could raise a few chickens and maybe some goats. To move into an apartment, give up ownership, owe rent, and have no control over the destiny of our grounds or house is frankly unpleasant to me. It goes directly against my deeply independent nature. I’m naturally feral about my freedom, but that freedom originates and thrives from the place we call home; the hub of our privacy, the source of our ability to be masters of our destinies. An apartment is owned and tended by someone else. Thin walls prevent that essential barrier between us and other humans. To depend on someone to mow or fix the plumbing or rewire a light fixture (except when I have to call my brother for help) is not something I think I could live with. Not right now, anyway.

That doesn’t mean that I always get all my chores done, or manage to effectively sort out all that needs fixing, but that’s part of the freedom even if it drives me bonkers. At some point, as Pops informs me, you get tired of always needing to mow or blow leaves or weed or wire or rebuild or paint. At some point, the recliner just feels better and the chores can wait. That helped me feel a bit better. He’ll certainly feel as though he has less hanging over his head after his move.

Of course, we’re young and healthy. We have another thirty years at least (I hope) to downsize without stepping into a rental agreement. If, at some point, we become mysteriously wealthy, I assume we would be able to afford that dream cottage on a small patch of land with a glorious view of the sunset and a wide porch to sit on. I see us sipping tea and listening to the crickets each evening as we observe the daily solar art. We could hire nurses and yard scapers to help us as we age. I’m going to have to face it, though, at some point, we’ll have to shed our homeowner’s freedom. I’ve got to plan now for how I’m going to want to react and try to curtail my squealing when the time arrives.

I have nothing against people who rent. It can be a necessary stage in adulthood to live in an apartment or a rental house for a while. We both did it briefly (albeit separately) but I hated every minute of my experience. I am happy being able to keep my arm's length from the rest of the world.

We are extremely lucky to have our own place. Modern trends have made it incredibly difficult for younger generations to afford homes. We are maybe the last generation for a while to have that freedom and that wealth. I’m very grateful for our situation.

Pop Bare had to come to grips with the need to move on his own terms, I guess, but he eventually made the choice himself. Our senior adult parents have been healthy examples to us of how often the golden years require compromise with our best-laid plans. There will come a time when we will no longer be able to handle the immense house we live in, now. Even our fantasy cottage might become too much after a few more decades. There may come a time when we have to depart our homes and move into an ‘independent living unit’ at a retirement community or into assisted living. It’s not something that either of us wants, but it is something we have to face—eventually. When that time comes, I am practicing not to be recalcitrant, at least about that.

Our children deserve to be unburdened by their elderly parents in that foggy future. I would not ever want to become a parking brake stuck in the on position in their lives. I would no more wish that than to be tossed into a human-sized food processor filled with salt and lemon juice. I want to be independent and I think we both intend that, but if we eventually cannot be, then we will not be a drain on our kids.

This is not to say that Pop Bare has been a drain on us, exactly. He is stubborn and willful and does things according to his own idiom but he’s still master of his destiny and retains his autonomy and independence. That’s always been the case with him. He is getting older and it worries us that someone will try to take advantage of him or that he will become too frail to manage on his own, but he’s not there, yet. He’s far too obdurate to give in that easily without a fight.

All my life I thought I was the black sheep because of my tendency toward surly mulish pigheadedness and my inexplicable desire to do everything the hardest way. I now understand that I get my obstinate personality in the same way that I got my genetic cardiac condition: legitimately and directly from the Old Man.

Our kids will have to be aware of my propensity to be bull-headed. It will take patience from them and effort on my part, too. Maybe, as I get older, I’ll become more docile and less tetchy. Pops has calmed down a lot, too. I live 500 miles away, and it’s hard to be ill-tempered over the phone, but he seems to be easier going.

While I find the reality of no longer being a homeowner extremely distasteful, I’m proud of how well Pop Bare is handling his move, so far. He did this all on his own, despite years of pestering from his adult sons and their families. My brother helped to clear out some items Pops kept for both of us but otherwise, he used his realtor and lawyer to good effect.

The benefits of this move to him outweigh (by far) the detriments. He will no longer have the knee-shredding stairs to deal with. He will no longer have the temptation to start his snowblower or touch up the shoddy mowing of a landscaping company. Just about any other form of maintenance that a homeowner would need to deal with will no longer be on his mind. His pavements will be salted and shoveled. The only thing he will have to worry about is walking his little dog and the occasional trip to the grocery market. Aside from being stuck (for now) in the transition between moving out of one place and moving into the other, he seems to be ready and maybe even eager to make the change.

Longevity runs in both of our families, so there may be a chance that we live to be venerable little white-haired so-and-sos, the center of every family celebration, blissfully redolent of years of life experience and overflowing with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We will tottle about and give advice and tell stories of ‘our day’ and because we’re ancient, people will listen. But that’s a long way off. I want to live free in this moment, enjoying the days as they dawn and working toward aging less like an old cuss and more like a man who is grateful for what he has.

No matter what the future holds, whether we wind up moving to an apartment or assisted living,  we’re lucky to have the responsibility of owning a home and property. I’ll enjoy it now and be thankful for whatever comes.

Finding Fixed Points: The Joy of Revisiting Beloved Books

When he was in third grade, our youngest son read the book, “Holes,” by Louis Sachar upwards of twenty times. His teacher wanted him to read something else, but he loved that book and read it again and again, reveling in the joy the book brought him. I worked in the elementary school he attended and the teacher approached me about it. I told her that I was just as guilty of rereading the books and stories that I love, which she probably didn’t appreciate.

True story: I have made a habit of reading certain books over and over. It may seem odd, especially considering how many wonderful books out there I still need to read. Some hold a special place in my heart and mind; after a certain period, I feel compelled to revisit them. Others are as much a part of the yearly cycle as the seasons and holidays we look forward to.

Revisiting a novel may seem odd if you’ve never done it. Books don't change. They tell the same stories each time I read them, using the same words, characters, settings, themes and motifs as when I read them years ago. However, I am not the same. Going back to a favorite book in a new era of my life, I always pick up on things I hadn't noticed or that suddenly resonate with me like never before. This magical shifting happens within me; the book—a fixed point—allows me to experience it anew from a different vantage in my life.

Admittedly, I'm a little obsessive about rereading. Annually, I read “The Lord of the Rings” beginning on September 22nd after having reread “The Hobbit” in May. Each time I travel along with Sam and Frodo and the Fellowship from the Shire to Mordor and then to Gondor and back to the Shire, I come away a slightly better person. It’s hard to explain to someone who has never read Professor Tolkien's stories, but Middle Earth holds many lessons and examples of heroism, friendship, love, devotion to nature and the overarching message that simple folk can save the world if they have courage and are true to who they are and where they come from.

One of my most beloved authors, Christopher Hitchens, thought Tolkiens's many works were constipated and dull. Hitch preferred Evelyn Waugh and Richard Llewellyn, which feel like water torture to me, so we have that difference. Yet Hitch wrote at least two books that I regularly reread; “God is Not Great”, which helped me to shed the chains of religious belief, and his memoir, “Hitch-22”. I owe him greatly, too, because he started me on Wodehouse and introduced me to Saul Bellow and the poetry of Philip Larkin and others. His loss not only removes a powerful polemic wit when we could use him most, but he sadly wrote too few books and no more will be forthcoming.

If you like nonfiction as much as I do, you may enjoy Bill Bryson. Several of his books are excellent and well-suited for repetitive reading. My four favorites are “A Walk in the Woods”, about the Appalachian Trail; “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”, a memoir of Bryson’s childhood in Des Moines in the 1950s; “One Summer: America, 1927”, about Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and many other events; and “At Home: A Short History of Private Life”. Bryson retired from writing in 2020—something I didn’t know writers could or would ever do, but he’s left us quite a shelf-full and all are excellent uses of reading time.

I revisit Stephen King sometimes, though I have mainly kept my reading to his early novels that I missed when they were first published. However, I just reread “IT” this year and it holds up. I’ve got an essay drafted about this superior book, where I argue that King is well on his way to becoming a classic American author, on par with Flannery O’Connor, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and all because of the power and relevance of “IT”. King isn’t for everybody, but he can capture the voice of the modern era and his work is spectacularly composed. 

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is one of my most beloved books, though I have never been able to bring myself to read the sequel, “Go Set a Watchman”. Lee may have been coerced to release the latter just before her death, but for me, I realized a long time ago her first book says all it needs to about the Finches of Maycomb County and the state of the South in the 1930s. Its universe is almost perfectly rendered, and the lessons in it are no less relevant today. Each time I read it, I come away deeply moved and challenged in my worldview, hoping that the younger generations will pave the way to peace and unity.

Other books I love but revisit less often. “Moby-Dick” is worth more than one read for sure, but can probably be read once a decade. This is true of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, the Alice adventures by Lewis Carrol and anything by any of the Brontë sisters. I usually read William Golding's “Lord of the Flies” about once a decade or so, too, though it is beginning to seem more relevant, as our society is being devoured by primal polarization and tribalism. G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Campbell, Hemingway, Twain, Wharton, Eliot and Austen can all be relegated to the ‘once per decade’ slot.

Some books and stories are just necessary for my mental health. Among those that ward off the blues are the Jeeves and Wooster books, by P.G. Woodhouse. I read Bertie and Jeeves often and have kept their books in my regular rotation. Although wonderful themselves, as I've written here before, they also work well as palate-cleansers between the heavier nonfiction books I like. After a gloomy book about the rise of Christian Nationalism a few months ago, Bertie’s hilarious misadventures helped me to breathe and laugh again. I dip into Lovecraft almost as often for the same reasons. Something about his brand of cosmic horror soothes me, though it might take a trained psychologist to explain it. There is peace in not knowing everything that lies beyond the stark borders of human knowledge and remembering that, thankfully, human lust for power and wealth is oppressively local in terms of our solar system and galaxy.

Short novels and short stories are an integral part of who I am. I have always been drawn to short stories, often finding them just as appealing, if not more so, than lengthy novels. This preference likely stems from my early reading experiences, where I developed a deep admiration for short story writers. Among my favorites are Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, Clark Ashton Smith, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What could be better than a shorter novel? In particular, one of my top five novellas is “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which I consider the finest of the four Sherlock Holmes novels and perhaps the best short novel ever written. I elaborate elsewhere on why I believe this. While some literature professors might challenge my opinion in a dark alley, I welcome the debate, though I doubt my stance will change.

Finally, I love to delve regularly into ancient texts. Anglo-Saxon verse, Old Norse mythology in the Poetic and Prose Eddas and sagas, and the vast epic, Beowulf are all foundational to my worldview and my deep love of history and verse. They were introduced to me in my high school career and I have loved them ever since. Each holds a germ of where we come from but also teaches us that the old ways aren’t always outdated.

Sometimes poetry feels more appropriate. I love to read Robert Burns, Ogden Nash, W.H. Auden and Robert Frost just to name a few poets, though Frost captures my love of autumn and  Burns my love of, as Jeeves would say, “the North British dialect, Sir”. An argument could be made that Shakespeare’s plays (never a fan of his sonnets) are all long-form poems—they are written in iambic pentameter—and so Hamlet and King Lear and a few others are fun to read routinely. I love Hamlet (the play) so much and it remains his best and most poignant tragedy but has also replaced some of the inane tidbits of scripture I was once forced to memorize. I find that he deals with questions of ethics and morality in a far more suitable and potent way than bronze-age goatherder diaries.

As you know by now, I listen to many of these books, which allows me to be productive (yard work, chores, commute to work on foot, etc.) while also being able to read. I love to read, though I am usually too restless to sit for prolonged periods unless I’m at the beach. The narrators are excellent at performing the different characters and making the stories come alive. A good friend of mine often razzes me about this, claiming that listening is not the same as actually reading. Research indicates that comprehension levels between listening to audiobooks and reading printed text are generally indistinguishable. Why would we read to children if it didn’t help them learn to love to read? I still love to be read to. In my opinion, whether the books are absorbed through the eyes or the ears, it goes to the same part of the brain. The visualization of the stories is the same either way, and my ability to retain the information is enhanced.

I hope this essay has provided you, my readers, with some books that you may want to read and some authors you may want to get to know. I truly hope that, if you do decide to read any of those mentioned, you will get as much from them as I have. However you read and whatever types of books you like, what ultimately matters is that you are reading. So pour yourself a cup of strong tea, find a cozy spot by a window or the fireplace, pull that book you’ve been meaning to start from the shelf and crack it open. If it happens to be a book you’ve read before, so be it. No rule forbids a second or a third, or a yearly visit with an old favorite. A new world of experiences lies before you. If you truly love that book, in a few years, you can read it again.

Author’s Note:

I love George Orwell. Readers familiar with my reading preferences will wonder why I didn’t mention him here. Orwell occupies a unique place in my literary pantheon. Unlike other authors I revisit for pleasure, my engagement with Orwell's work is more akin to a lifelong study. His writings have become so deeply ingrained in my intellectual landscape that I constantly find myself absorbing and reflecting on his ideas. Other authors are seasonal or transitory; Orwell is forever.

My shelves groan under the weight of Orwell’s books and his biographies, and I regularly immerse myself in his columns, letters, diaries and articles through dedicated online resources. This ongoing exploration feels less like repetitive reading and more like a continuous dialogue with one of the early 20th century's most incisive minds.

While Orwell's seminal works like "1984" and "Animal Farm" are essential reading for their prescient warnings about totalitarianism—warnings that remain disturbingly relevant today and, as such, worth reading often—his broader body of work represents a tireless commitment to exposing authoritarianism and brutality in all its forms.

However, given this essay's focus on recreational reading, I've chosen not to delve into Orwell here. His works, though profoundly impactful, often serve a more practical and educational purpose rather than pure literary leisure. Nonetheless, Orwell's influence on my thinking and worldview cannot be overstated, even if it manifests differently from my relationship with other beloved authors and their books.