I love books. I love words and how they can be strung together to create images, tell stories and share emotions.
I love having books. I love opening new ones with the same crackle as opening a bottle of wine and opening old ones that smell like your grandma’s basement.
But I have a terrible secret; I am a lazy, undisciplined, terrible reader.
There, I said it.
The worst part about that is – I love to write! And all good writers need to read, a lot.
Somewhere along the road of phonics, grammar and comprehension, I developed some very dedicated reading rules for myself. So structured and disciplined, that I have made reading not fun.
My rules to reading include:
You must read every page, every word. The author put them there for a reason; you owe it to him or her to read them and if you don’t you won’t understand the rest of the book.
If you don’t understand something, however insignificant, you must go back through the book, combing through every page until it makes sense because if you get to the end of the book without understanding everything, you won’t understand anything.
Reading a book is like a marriage, it is important to stay with one book until you are finished. Till the end do us part. I am terribly monogamous when it comes to books, and find it very difficult to stray from one book to another. If I do, and I must confess, I have done this many times, I feel guilt at the pleasure this second book gives me and no matter how much I want to pick it up again, I will resist until I have completed the relationship I already started. But then I begin to resent the first book, longing to get back to the story in the second book. In the end, I resent both books, and don’t finish reading either.
I have other secret books on my iPhone that I read ONLY when I am waiting at a doctor’s office or when I’m waiting to pick up my kids, never in my home where my other books might see me.
And then there is my Kobo, but I haven’t really figured out how to use that yet.
Don’t even get me started about my rules about books on tape!
To paraphrase Kermit the Frog; it’s not easy being me.
But why wonder why.
I love reading the paper. Every Wednesday and Saturday I anxiously await the St. Albert Gazette. In fact, many years ago I convinced my son to take up the paper route on our crescent, mostly for him to have a little money, but secretly to ensure that I would get the paper right away. I devour our community stories, scan the photos for people I recognize and check out what’s going on for the upcoming weekend. The letters to the editor, the court news, the section on Our People!
And I love Stephen King. There, I said it. I get a huge thrill from his books and I blaze through them at lightning speed. In fact, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was reading Madame Bovary, which is excellent, but found myself saying, “Bovine is just fine, but I got a need, a need for Steve.”
I read his novel Insomniac, not a great book, but a great escape. How could I worry about having my first child when these people were experiencing such horrors. I didn’t see the pattern, but with my second pregnancy, I read his book Bag of Bones. Therefore, when I was in my third pregnancy, I had no choice, and like the NHL playoff beards, I had to read and complete a Stephen King novel prior to going into labour. That pregnancy choice was Dreamcatcher.
For some strange reason, my reading rules do not apply to Stephen King or to the Gazette, maybe that’s why I enjoy them.
By my bed right now is the novel The Haunting by Shirley Jackson (a library book that I have twice renewed), The City of Dark Magic (also a library book that I refuse to return because there apparently is a “dwarf with an attitude” in it).
