As For Me…

I am not one to give up on a book I’m reading, but I recently set aside a biography of Frederick Douglas. It was well written, wonderfully researched, compelling, fascinating, and really, really sad. That guy struggled his whole life for a just cause–struggled to the very limits of his human endurance–and saw only inadequate progress, all but thrown away almost as soon as it was won, and now we’re backsliding on that progress again at warp speed. For my nighty-nighty reading, I am not up to the challenge of absorbing that content. The material is important, and I will finish the book, but it cannot be my bedtime reading. Bedtime reading, from the time I was in grade school, has been for detaching from the day, going to a place where justice triumphs, truth and courage carry the day, and love conquers all (by the end of the book). It takes about twenty minutes for a good story to reduce our stress by nearly two thirds, improve our sleep quality, enhance our vocabulary, broaden our…