Do you ever wish you could stop time so you could sit and read uninterrupted? My reading pile has gotten so big in the past few days. I’ll never get through it all and that makes me sort of sad. I read Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, Thomas Chatterton Williams account immersing himself into the culture of hip-hop while young and how he got out of it. The subtitle doesn’t do the book justice. Williams book really is about discovering oneself and how hip-hop culture debases the black culture. His father, a sociologist by training, spent his life reading, teaching himself because no one else would. In the book, he tells his son that he never reads for enjoyment. He carefully underlines sentences in each book, magazine, and newspaper he reads. Thomas Williams finally figures out that he’s lucky because he can read for purely aesthetic reasons. I’m paraphrasing some really wonderful chapters here.
My point about stopping time is that Williams references reading authors like Kierkegaard and Dostoevesky and what he learned from these wonderful books. It made me want to go back and read them so badly. But each day, a new galley of something equally awesome has shown up on my desk. If I could stop time, I’d read them all. Right now, I have to pick what to read next: The Brothers Karamazov or Kraken by China Mieville. What to choose?
Bookdwarf 
You won’t go wrong with either, but I recommend Mieville if you’re thinking of him now. There’s no way you’ll get through life without reading BK at least once, so why rush?
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Hi Megan,
Thanks for the tip about “Loosing My Cool”. Will get that when it comes out in paperback. “Kraken” sounds wonderful! The perfect summer reading. Let me know what you think of it.
I plan to save it for mid-summer. Just finishing “Cutting for Stone” (Wonderful Novel!) and looking forward to Dave Mitchell’s new novel!
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Hope all is well. Best for the summer. Enjoyed the Atlanta airport tale.
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Karamazov! Karamazov! It’s my favorite novel. Skip the Grand Inquisitor part, though.
Re the Williams book: our culture, as I once read in an essay, is supposed to be “the third parent” helping parents raise children.
Instead it has become a pernicious and destructive competitor against time and values.
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The point is have you ever read The Brother karamazov? If not that is a problem for you since this is a MustRead. So the answer is so simple, you even didnt need to ask for that
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