If someone had asked me that question ten years ago, I’d have lied through my teeth and said something like, “Oh, you know, The Classics, Greek Lit, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller, I could go on and on. Let’s have a beer.”

The truth is, the only literature I ever read was the literature of personal economics: bills, bills, bills.

Or a few comic books.

Today, my reading preferences are intellectual leaps and bounds ahead of The Green Lantern. I still have bills, but my reading list has expanded. Take a look at these challenging categories.

Maps
I like to read maps. I love to read maps. I like to read the most detailed maps I can find. A map with nothing on it but the Interstate Highway system isn’t a map but a piece of paper with a few lines on it.

I want a map so detailed that it will not only contain all of the ghost towns in Arizona but also little dotted lines signifying U.S. Forest Service maintenance roads. One of my Atlases shows all of the ranches in Nevada’s Cowboy Country. That’s what I call a map.

Readers’ Comments
In this category, I concentrate on Letters to the Editor and Responses to Blog Posts.

The output of Letter Writers is usually more reasoned and polite because the writer has to provide a real name. These are kind of boring, but it’s fun to imagine how hard the writer is sweating from the effort of remaining polite for 100 words.

Commenters on Blog Posts, though, let it all hang out. These are gut level utterances, complete with personal attacks, wishes for the death of someone, usually a politician, and a few healthy curse words.

When I read these, I can almost feel the guttural rumblings shaking my own innards like a base guitar on max amp. Sometimes, I’ll work my way through a few hundred comments, marveling at the intensity of misinterpretations. God, these are exhilarating. And they reinforce my feeling that I am the only sane and intelligent life form in the universe.

Letters from Family
These have become relics of days long gone. E-mail and a variety of other electronic means of communicating have pretty well consigned them to the scrap heap of lost pleasures. And pleasures they were. Letters contained the most loving words and the most precious memories imaginable, written by the hand of Mom, Dad, Aunt Mary, or Grandma. I’ll always remember these words my Grandma wrote in a letter to her son who was away at an Army camp.

“Bob and Johnny pulls off a big fight most every day.”

The Bob was me and the Johnny was a kid in the neighborhood. We got into it every day without fail and I literally got the s..t beat out of me because Johnny was older and bigger. But in the process, I usually managed to tear his shirt to smithereens.

Despite the outcome on both sides, we’d head for one another the minute we stepped out of the house in the morning.

In hindsight, I see the fights between us as a part of growing up. And sometimes, I pull Grandma’s letter out of my file and read it and laugh at the memory.

If Only
If American culture could have a rebirth of any of its many lost cultural habits, the resurgence of letter writing would, I believe, go a long way toward revitalizing family relations and toning down the vitriolic rhetoric around us.

Reading a letter from a loved one is the most calming exercise I have ever experienced.