I gotta be honest, and hopefully you guys won't think less of me for it, but I can't read those old style writings. I got the Nessmuck book and made it about a third of the way in and had to abandon ship. That book just bored the bawls off of me. Don't get me wrong. I love "old style" gear like traditional packs, flints and strikers, etc. There's just too much in that book and books like it that I'm like, "what the hell?" I'm sure that a large part of it is a problem that I've had since I was a kid. I have trouble processing what I read and often have to read something a few times before I really grasp what it says. Then you add in descriptions of materials from the "old world" and a language much different from my own and I get lost really easily. For some reason, I just can't visualize a lot of this stuff and it ends up looking to me like a manifest of materials and instructions on how to put together a model car I don't have. I've taken survival classes that incorporated a lot of "old world" knowledge and I loved it, but if you were to take that same instruction and put it in a book with a turn of the century New England accent, I just can't process it and stay interested. My wife makes fun of me. In the time it takes me to make it through a chapter of a book and really understand what it says, she can knock out a whole novel and absorb all of it. I need to go to the Derrick Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Want to Learn to Do Other Things Good Too.
