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Thursday, September 1, 2011

This is what happened: Reading

These are all the books I'm concurrently reading.
(Well, I've finished Love Wins and A Credible Witness. But on my Kindle, I'm going through The Tipping Point and A Time for Everything.)

Actually, there are way too many books for me to be actively reading concurrently. The ones on top are the ones I have picked up the most recently, and I have a predilection of wanting to pick up where I left off, which leaves the books on the bottom resting at that last position longer.

Most of the time when I take the bus to school in lieu of biking, it's so I can have time to get some more reading done. It makes the time pass by rather quickly, and sometimes I am so engrossed in a novel that I forget my stop. (Okay, that actually only happened once - since then I've been too paranoid about missing my stop that I look up every few sentences to get my bearings.)

When I was younger and learned English, I had a totally voracious reading appetite. I remember going to the public library weekly with a canvas tote bag full of books, and exchanging all of them for another dozen or more; without exaggeration, I read about a hundred books a month. They probably weren't full length novels, since I was rather new at the whole English thing, but the volume was impressive. In high school I'd find myself (guiltily) finishing entire novels at Barnes and Nobles in the span of a few hours, though I had first gone with the intention of finding some book for school.

If an addiction is a habit until it becomes unhealthy, then I was addicted to reading. The first time I can remember being close to dying was sometime in my elementary years. We were walking back to the car from the library, and I was already nose deep into a book from my tote bag - I'd probably finish it by the time I got home. My parents got ahead of me and crossed the street, and I squeezed between two cars, still reading, and almost stepped out when I heard my parents yelling at me - and I looked up and a car raced by right in front of me. I almost died by reading! There is probably some high nerd accolade for that, if I had achieved ending my life prematurely that way.

Another example of reading being hazardous to my health: I remember many nights during summers, especially around the time I discovered the Redwall series, when I would make myself comfortable on my parents' bed, propped up with a pillow and a blanket, and read for hours and hours through the night. I had such amazing willpower and self-denial at that time - I would be so, so, so thirsty, but I wanted to keep reading and I didn't want to interrupt it by going to the kitchen and getting a cup of water, even if it would take ten seconds. I don't know how many times I shuffled slowly from the bedroom to the kitchen, navigating with one hand in front of me as if I was blindfolded, and doing the careful maneuver of drinking some water without removing my eyes from the pages. I think I was so stubborn about reading, I could have died from dehydration or a burst bladder.

I guess now I have other obligations and things to do, like chores and practicing and surviving, but I wonder why I don't have the appetite I once had to just lose myself in a book. I'm too easily distracted by ever-present Starcraft VODs and pictures of cats on the internet.

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