The great bane of my reading has not been stress or time, but Facebook and Twitter. Social media is, as they used to say, a quibi: quick and long at the same time; which makes reading seem like too much work to get revved into. So I am trying something: a little Thornton Burgess to start the day. Burgess wrote little nature stories of a quality and quantity that Beatrix Potter only dreamed of.
Burgess’ writing is charming: short and quaint and extremely episodic, which helps to get the taste of social media rhetorical sourpatch candy out of your mouth. I recommend reading a chapter in between pauses of heavier, tome-like reading.
You can get much of his works for free at Project Gutenberg or very cheap at Amazon. There is, of course, a Burgess society, but it seems to be much more focused on his conservation ideas than his books. He was apparently very interested in the wellbeing of forests and forest creatures.
neumatikos 