On the Necessity of Non-Linear Reading Habits

This past spring, small house finches pulled at the cords that hold up the two-liter bottles in which my tomato plants (cherry, sun gold) bore fruit. I watched the birds pull the small strings, ever cautious to stop, pivot, and fly off. They were building a nest up in our apple tree (Golden Delicious) and were gathering both the detritus of modern human living and the necessary twigs and grasses.

When a chef considers new recipes, he/she might sit down, allow for the following considerations: seasonal ingredients,  accessibility, cost, preparation time, customer demand, previously popular dishes, texture, and presentation. Peaches, for example, are just-so ripe and available for such a short time that the timing of their eating is almost a sacrament. And the elusive black trumpet mushroom, hiding in the dim cover of tanoaks and redwoods, is a found treasure. Thus, the "special" is not just special; well done, it is an integration of multiple elements, some controllable and some not, to include earth and air, labor, time, and the more literal limits of price.

And how do you choose where to live? Money, of course, but there are other factors, the foremost question is who are you? Do you need quiet? City life? What is your relationship status, and do you have children? What climate suits you? How many rooms, and how about the neighbors? The variables are a litter of voices vying for consideration, all in the key of decide.

Nothing is as cursory as it seems. Which has its pros, its cons. Which is why, as I pivot towards back-to-work mode in August, my reading list continues to be a mixture of whim, errata, and stops and starts. Here, for example, are my most recent reads:

1) Consumer Reports magazine, current issue
2) Land's End catalogue
3) Yeats's Ghosts, a biography by Brenda Maddox, in which, among other aspects of his life (which unfortunately I am less in admiration of, his admiration of fascism and Mussolini, as well as his easy susceptibility to mediums, though it must be underscored that this was not uncommon to his era) his writing process is described. He revised frequently, worked on poems for months.
4) Smithsonian Gem, a Definitive Visual Guide, which is a large book with pictures, to include photos of intricately faceted Bulgari watches, minerals (and I did not know sea shells were considered minerals!), colored stones to include Bornite (peacock ore, a beauty). My daughter has been reading these to me in the evenings as we gasp at the colors, sizes, and demanding cuts of brilliant pressures. I would not give this up, I would not.
5) Costco Magazine. Sometimes the recipes inspire, and often I take flights of fancy into other lives via their lawn furniture advertisements, or travel packages.

Bird, chef, home purchase; gems and clothes and Yeats. Somewhere there is a Nautilus scuttling through water, adding to its spiraling shell.

And there are times when productivity and its pressures are not only, well, counterproductive, but unnecessary. At times - and perhaps at this one - a reading "goal" other than pleasure, other than want, is not needed at all.