A Dilettante's dilemma

If I am to be brutally honest, I am a dilettante.  I learned early in my teens to have a Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable at hand when reading.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your general knowledge grows and expands over a short period of time – or instantly, depending upon your learning level and how easy it is to retain what many would consider trivia.

My Brewer’s was a godsend before I discovered Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics, with their annotated notes which elucidates on classical allusions, foreign words and phrases and other matters concerning the text which modern readers might be unaware of.

I used to astonish parents and myself with what I knew when we would watch quizzes on telly.

And when I started performing my poems people would assume that I had a university education or at least read deeply of the classics.

Recently I have been dipping into Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson and Thomas De Quincey.  I had intended to read one author in the morning and another in the afternoon. 

However, I dip into them randomly, which is pleasing at the time but nags at me later.  It is my usual method for reading.

I am hoping to be more disciplined in my reading, and hoped I would be able to read an author’s work of essays in chronological order.  But after running one’s eyes down the contents, I cannot help but dip in at whatever has caught my fancy.

It is the dilettante in me.