FIVE Books. In His Entire Life.

And, sadly, this might be “normal.” Now. I’ve read several times more books that were autographed to me personally by the authors; usually gifts.

What Passes for Exceptional
I want to give this guy props for trying, but more importantly, I want more people to be aware, that he is EXCEPTIONAL, not average. He’s TRYING.

-sigh- I’d already read considerably more than five books before I ever started school. By now? I couldn’t tell you even to the nearest thousand. I’ve written more than five books; from fiction to crafts to tech manuals. And eye the words so far out of his vocabulary that he had to look them up. Thalidomide? I knew that one in my teens.

And that’s just bound books, or their electronic editions. I’m not counting hundreds-to-thousands pages bills, or court decisions, or research papers, magazine articles, and the like. Just books.

Back in the ’80s ( and roughly the age of our illiterate hero above), I was stationed in New Mexico. I got orders for Turkey, and had some books to unload that I couldn’t take with me. A girl in El Paso expressed an interest, so I told her I’d bring them down. It was hilarious.

She was about twenty and living with her parents. I knocked at the door and her mother answered, to find me standing there with a couple of big brown grocery sacks (remember those?) full of paperbacks. She expressed amazement, called her daughter, and told me to come in. I handed off the bags to W—-, but said I had to go back to my truck.

I came back with a couple more sacks. Mom’s eyes bugged out, and W—- said something about not expecting so many. I just said I’d be back, and went out to my truck again.

In the end, I left approximately 1,500 books with her. Those were just the ones I’d accumulated in my two years in New Mexico. The book stores in town loved me.

A few years later, leaving Georgia for Greece, I did it again. There, I’d been recycling more of my reading material through a used bookstore/exchange. They’d give you credit of one book for each two books you turned in (basically, there were some restrictions on age, condition, genre…). My store credit card wasn’t going to do me any good in Greece, so I gave it a teen girl in town.

It had around 300 books credit on it. Meaning I’d turned in 600 that I’d read. And believe me, not all the books I’d bought in the sorta two years I’d lived there (interrupted by my Desert Shield/Desert Storm deployment) got turned in for credit. I hung on to plenty.

Over the years, I’ve read thousands of fiction, history, law, physics, chemistry, construction, brewing and distillation, cooking, electronics, computer, prospecting and mining, astronomy, cosmology, electrical systems, plumbing, pottery, firearms, solar power systems… and Bog only knows what else… books. And written a lot of material on many of those topics.

So I hate it when I get into an Internet argument with some under-educated clown who’s managed five books in his life, who tells me he knows more because he saw in in a easy book with small words.

 

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Bear

2A advocate, writer, firearms policy & law analyst, general observer of pre-apocalyptic American life.

5 thoughts on “FIVE Books. In His Entire Life.”

  1. So there is another word he doesn’t know. Ignorant or ignorance. I pause in calling him stupid. He is ignorant. Ignorance can be fixed, to a degree, stupidity usually cannot. Funny how most people think being called ignorant is worse than being called stupid. One of those has the possibility of being fixed. The solution to his problem is doing just what he is doing. Reading and looking up the words he doesn’t know. I hope he keeps working on it.
    I have a brother-in-law that has the same issue. I’m sure he hasn’t fully read anything since high school 45 years ago. He probably didn’t even read then. He lived with us briefly last year. I spent hours at the computer with him when he was filling out applications for jobs. It was painful for me.

  2. I feel you. I used to ask people IF they read. Now, I feel that I should be asking if they CAN read. It is a sad state of affairs. . .

  3. I once had a woman bitch at me for “using big words” after making a reference to “residual heat.”

    I’m 50 years old, but I still stumble a bit when I’m hit in the face again by the fact that most Americans don’t really read, and have a vocabulary of maybe 1,000 words.

  4. I read my first Heinlein juvenile at age 8. I’m now 72, and going strong, although my available reading time is short since I’m still working full time. Can’t really do more than guess at a total books read number as well, but probably near seven or eight thousand. Recently when returning from vacation and mentioning I had read 5 books during the week, most of the very nice people in the office admitted they don’t read books at all. Sad.

  5. Many of my house walls are covered from floor to ceiling with rows and rows of densely filled book shelves.

    I’m the beneficiary of both my father and my mother’s book collections but I have added my own and it rivals theirs with an attitude. Pretty sure they would be proud of it.

    The state of our Frankfurt_School_culturally_marxist-leftoxenomorphizised-feminazi-mis-mal-dis-education-system is no accident.

    In their war against humanity leftoxenomorphs see the ruinous state of what today passes for education as one of their most valuable tools.

    Education they don’t provide.
    The ruining of young minds is paramount to their plans.
    And so is imprinting young humans with large daily doses of leftoxenomorphism.
    Eff them up young and they’ll stay effed up forever, that’s what they say. And it’s true.

    Look at what today passes for education: a bunch of man hating, whites hating, feminazis, bent on doing their worst to ruin humanity and having their rocks off torturing boys in the process because they hate anything with a penis.

    And let’s not get started on the trans-nazim cult.

    All in a leftoxenomorph day’s work.

    If it is part of normal human culture, goodness, decency, value system, leftoxenomorphs hate it and want it destroyed.

    Today’s humans don’t read books, have no vocabulary, can hardly speak decently, read or understand. Can hardly think.

    And every institutional effort is bent on teaching obedience and putting all your wits into getting along with the leftoxenomorph-ant-swarm.

    Gleichschaltung and kadavergehorsamkeit are the order of the day.

    TPTB. Nazis. They nazi. And we let them.

    Human civilization is being pushed into the oubliette of the emerging feudal religion of leftoxenomorphism bent on world conquest in a fast regression to the medieval Dark Ages.

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