I used to read books compulsively, as easy as breathing. When I was a teenager, I picked up a fresh book before the next one was cool. It was a wonderful time — I had friends like Heinlein, Tolkien, Adams and Vonnegut, not to mention a brace of science fiction and fantasy greats.
Later, after I married, I let my wife suggest some books to e. I Read Rice, Irving and a few others. After college, I tackled Tolstoy, and tried (and failed) to follow it up with Dostoyevsky.
I fell in love with Lewis, and spent several years pouring over his books. I also got caught up in some popular bestsellers; Rowling and Meyers come to mind.
Gradually, though, my reading became a special occasion rather than a way of life. I read when I wanted to share something someone else was reading, or I nibbled at books in a hot bath. But I didn't devour books anymore. I left several books half-finished. Finally, even the books I would classify as "easy reads" seemed too formidable for me.
I blame the Internet.
The same perfectly-made tool that's allowing me to post this on the World Wide Web has made it far too easy for me to take the Internet with me wherever I go. As a result, I use it — very likely much more than I should.
As a consequence, I've been feeling a little part of me slowly dying. I haven't been aware of it for long, but it's similar to what I felt when I noticed that my love of music was mostly dead. A disquieting sense that something that I used to like about myself, something important, was withering and dying. And, growing by degrees, a sense that I didn't want it to.
The pebble that started the avalanche was a post on News, Weather & Sports by one of my mentors, Neil Peart of Rush. He was talking about time machines of all sorts — cars, songs, photos; things that take you back in time, or make you aware of the passage of it. One of Neil's time machines of choice is are books, and he illustrated the point with a fat stack of nine books represented his reading list for 10 days one February. He talked in glowing terms about the worlds that lurked behind the spine of each book, waiting to be discovered, its contours mapped out individually inside your mind. And he alluded to notion that, if there really was a heaven, it might just consist of endless time by the fire, with nothing to do but turn pages.
I was inspired and intimidated at the same time.
Inspired because I immediately wanted to started checking books off my reading list. Intimidated because reading has always been kind of an effort for me, and the stack of books he was going to take down in 10 days would have taken me two months of vacation time. Maybe more.
It's not my reading speed, which is serviceable, if not spectacular. It's because often when I'm reading, there's always the restless notion that I should be elsewhere, doing something else. Usually, it gets the best of me, and I wind up doing just that. Add to this my regrettable tendency to get stalled halfway through a book, walk away, and usually never return, and you wind up with a person that doesn't get a lot of books finished.
The last time I had a good read was more than a year ago, when I literally had nothing else to do. Then, I did read nine books, but it took me a little longer than ten days. I was flat on my back, recovering (or trying to recover) from a ruptured disc. Reading seemed like an excellent use of my time. And it was, but after four months, I eventually had to get better, and go back to work.
And that's a good thing, as far as it goes. But Neil's picture made me realize that it was time to get back to work in another way. And finally, two days ago, I yielded to the impulse.
I started by dusting off my Goodreads account, which I hadn't updated since finishing The Book of Mormon in October. My "currently reading" section had five books, four of them quite cold. I decided to pull those for the time being, and start with some new fare. And since I think the fact that I try to take down so many books at once is also to blame, I have decided to try to limit what I read at any given time.
So that makes, ah, four books. Well, that's one less than five.
I'll keep you posted on my progress, dear readers. Until then, happy reading.
1 comment:
I've noticed for me that the more books I start reading at one time, the harder it is to read them. Of course, I can balance one non fiction and one fiction (and one scriptural, but it's not the same kind of reading, per se). I know for others, though that they thrive on reading multiple books at one time.
I definitely think that I go through periods where the Internet lessens the amount of books I read, and I've learned I far prefer "physical" reading rather than virtual reading, and reading novels to reading random blogs or articles. That doesn't necessarily mean I always choose novels over Internet (for one thing, I'm an obsessive reader - I like to read things in one setting if possible, and this gets very difficult while trying to balance three kids and a home and hundreds of pages of reading at the same time), but it is good to remember how much I like literary (or "popular") reading.
If you do still feel motivated after Percy Jackson, which series Avram and I both thoroughly enjoyed, I would recommend trying Brandon Sanderson (Elantris is a stand alone novel - it's his first one, there's also the one we gave you, that is the first in a trilogy).
Post a Comment