Pickwick Papers to Paul's Poems

While my life bumps along through a rough patch on a couple of fronts, I've been rediscovering the world of books and the solace of meeting fresh perspectives through them. Took a stack of books out of the library, returned half no more than glanced at, but got through all of Royal Murders (sadly, returned, so I don't have the author's name on hand and renewed The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D. / by James Reston, Jr. and By the Sword: a History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions / by Richard Cohen.

I would also like to recommend, from the PG Public Library, The Tale of One Bad Rat
/ by Bryan Talbot, published by Dark Horse Books. This one is a graphic novel, dealing with a rat-loving girl called Helen, breaking free from a victim's assumption of guilt and shame over childhood sexual abuse by her father, through bonds with a pet rat, new friends and a deep fascination with Beatrix Potter and the Lake District in England. Beautiful creation on many fronts.

The Pickwick Papers by Dickens is a joyful discovery. I am taking in a chapter a night before bed and finding the slow pace and elaborate language wonderfully alien to our hectic existence in the modern world.

And then, like a miracle, just as I find myself surprised that I gave up so much of my inner life to work long hours when it no longer seems clear that it was necessary ... I discover a resonance of doubt about the sanity of 21st century capitalist lifestyles in a friend's poems.

The friend is Paul Strickland, someone who has always cared about writing and reading and struggles, like so many of us, to find a place for both in his life. His poem "Work Liberates" is a ten line question about why we let our personalities become submerged in corporate profit motives. It ends, on a cynical note, with: "To work is to pray." His longer poem, "Lunacy", paints vignettes of moments in history where we took a wrong turn in chosing our icons, marching towards a starker, darker world of greed and aggression. Paul is a closet poet. I would like to see his work appear before the public some day.