I'm a voracious reader. One year I read eighty-one books, most of which were over three hundred pages. I usually read non-fiction, but I do mix in a classic fiction book now and then. Mostly, I read non-fiction because there was so much I missed out on in college, having CLEP'd my way out of two years of history courses. If it wasn't related to Spain or Philosophy, I probably didn't learn it.
As for fiction, I've read a lot of the classics -- War and Peace, Don Quijote, The House of the Seven Gables -- but I found that my reading lists were woefully deficient. I only read Moby Dick last year; in ninth grade, when were given the choices of 1984, Animal Farm, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, I chose Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, about apartheid in South Africa. Right now I'm working my way through Gulliver's Travels...and three other books.
Along the way, I've learned some curious things. Things that, at best, might help me win a drink at a bar or a game of Trivial Pursuits. I thought I'd list them just so I don't forget them, first, but also to show what weird little factoids can be found in books.
-- Walter Cronkite's mother dated Douglas MacArthur's father, meaning that instead of being Walter Cronkite, he could have been Douglas MacArthur.
-- Jimmy Stewart allegedly lost his virginity to Marlene Dietrich.
-- George S. Patton wrote an article detailing how the Japanese might attack Pearl Harbor six years before they did...and he was thoroughly accurate.
-- Scaphism is a horrible way to die. Look it up.
-- Thomas Paine never earned a dime from Common Sense. He donated all the royalties from his book to the Continental Congress.
-- The symbol for paragraph is called a pilcrow.
-- Brent Musberger wasn't particularly well-liked by his colleagues because he would take their stories and pass them off as their own right before they would appear on camera with him.
-- The meter came about due to an error in measurement, but people decided to leave it as it was.
-- Porcelain was a well-guarded secret because the process was considered to be so valuable economically.
-- It is exceedingly difficult to know whether a bottle marked as extra virgin olive oil is, in fact, EVOO, because so many corners are cut. EVOO, when it is pure, is ridiculously expensive.
-- Avuncular and paternal Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, had an affair.
-- Not all African athletes excel in sprinting. Studies have shown that while western African athletes have fast-twitch muscles making them ideal for sprinting, eastern African athletes have slow-twitch muscles, making them ideal for stamina events like long-distance running.
-- In Nazi Germany during World War II, there was actually an orchestra comprised of Jews who were allowed to live and play within the German populace and were not imprisoned in concentration camps.
-- Some of the sinkings of Japanese aircraft carriers were the result of near-misses by aerial bombs that loosened the rivets on the hulls of the ships, thereby making them less seaworthy and more susceptible to internal pressures that arose from direct hits.
-- Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon and an Ohio native, attended Purdue University.
-- Henry Nicholas John Gunter, an American, was likely the last person killed in the Great War. He was killed at 10.59a, or one minute before the Armistice was to go into effect.
-- But for a delayed phone call, John Wooden would have been the head coach at the University of Minnesota and not UCLA.
-- One of the Price Is Right models was married to a CIA operative who was killed in the line of duty.
(c) 2020 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
