I was always reading something. Whether it be the Classic Comics version of the Peleponesian war or a biography of Ataturk in a “great men” series, even as a kid, I had to be invested in some manifestation of the printed word. This was true throughout my youth and reading only became a chore rather than a necessity when I became a professional writer. When I had to read certain tracts I would otherwise have happily ignored, my relationship with the word changed big time.

My cancer diagnosis and present condition – flat on my back – sends me back in time and I’m enjoying a literary second childhood – I get to read for pleasure again. Yes, I reread the complete works of Robert Heinlein, really I did. His so-called juveniles – with their emphasis on duty, competence, and virtue – could not be published today: I especially like the one where a Boy Scout troup saves the space colony from destruction.

Stranger in a Strange ... Robert A. Heinlein Best Price: $1.35 (as of 07:50 UTC - Details) Returning to the works of Louis Bromfield is another advantage to being very ill and unable to do much else but read (when I’m not writing). His odes to the agrarian society, The Farm, and Pleasant Valley, are a delight for the prose alone. The politics of the Jeffersonian tradition are here exhibited in all its distinctly American simplicity.

Bromfield was a wildly successful commercial writer whose novels were the big bestsellers of the time and whose screenplays made him a fortune – which he poured into Malabar Farm, returning to the scene of his youth in Richland county, Ohio. There he experimented with new farming methods, polemicized against the New Deal’s collectivist farming policies and wrote a searing indictment of the military industrial complex, A New Pattern for a Tired World.

Right now at this moment I’m reading Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, a venture into the vintage that is already proving all-embracing. Over 500 pages depicting life in a more stately time. Pleasant Valley Louis Bromfield, Gene ... Best Price: $11.87 Buy New $49.70 (as of 07:10 UTC - Details)

I confess to reading – or trying to read – two books at once. The Drury piece is nicely balanced out with John J. Mearsheimer’s latest, The Great Delusion, which debunks the mythology of liberalism and exposes it for the namby-pamby nonsense it is. Mearsheimer is merciless.

One book I intend to reread is the little-known novel by Henry Hazlitt, Time Will Run Back. Yes, a novel, first published in 1951, by the famous libertarian economist which is about a future dictator of the world who realizes their socialist system is a failure and proceeds to use his dictatorial powers to dismantle the old system and construct a new one – which means rediscovering the principles of the free market.

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A New Pattern for a Ti... Louis Bromfield Best Price: $5.95 (as of 07:10 UTC - Details) The Great Delusion: Li... John J. Mearsheimer Best Price: $12.16 Buy New $18.58 (as of 07:10 UTC - Details) Time Will Run Back Hazlitt, Henry Best Price: $14.95 Buy New $16.95 (as of 08:00 UTC - Details)

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