When I was a kid, I would read five books at a time. I would have five different books lying around, and switch between them as my interest moved. Often, I would lose one for a while (or leave it someplace like inside the refrigerator), so pick up a different one and read it for a while, and so on. I never needed to use bookmarks, because I could always find the exact paragraph I had left off - one sentence would be familiar, the next would not. In college, when assigned a paper to write, I would check out every book that had something to do with the subject, read all this information, and then the night before write the paper in one draft, with all the books laid out around me for reference. These essays were not works of high literature by any means, but they got the job done, and I generally got decent enough grades out of them.
Somewhere along the way I lost this habit. I would peg it as during my first marriage, when I bent and bent and bent trying to be accommodating, and she took and took and took. When we tried couples therapy, she stormed out twenty minutes into the first session, accusing us (the therapist and myself) of conspiring against her. Yeah, that helps. Anyway, I wound up seeing this therapist for a few more sessions solo, and that was very useful during that troubling time. It was then that I identified some of the elements of my true nature that I had suppressed in an effort to make things work. Given her increasing paranoia and anti-intellectualism, most of my 'thinky' things had gone. Well, I was pretty busy juggling all the tasks(1) to do much more anyway. One thing that I started doing again was the crossword puzzles. I used to love the Sunday NY Times puzzle, the big hard one. How satisfying to complete it! I went through a big sudoku phase, and now am getting pretty good at ken-ken.
But I did not restart the massive reading. I am not sure why, either at the time or in the intervening ten years. Sure I read books, but truly, not a lot of them. I haven't read science fiction or fantasy for many years. Maybe it's because of the internet. My sister tells me that Facebook is a big time-sink for her, but for me it is Wikipedia, following link after link after link...
So recently, watching my wife polish off one book after another, I was considering this, and I remembered how I used to read. Maybe that's the key, I figured; maybe I had found my natural frequency of oscillation all those years before. So I decided to try it out again. Here is the current lot:
1. How To Ace Calculus: The Streetwise Guide
By Colin Adams, Abigail Thompson, Joel Hass
2. Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic
By Lauren Smith, Derek Fagerstrom
3. Your Brain: The Missing Manual
By Matthew MacDonald
4. SQL Queries for Mere Mortals(R): A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL
By John L. Viescas, Michael J. Hernandez
5. What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists--Fully Explicated
By Peter D'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish
So there may be a theme here: all learning, no recreation. I should be changing that soon, as my father gave me a copy of Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman, and I am intrigued by the book Sophie's World by that Norwegian guy (although reviews say it is more of a philosophical text in disguise). #2 is mostly graphics, #4 is for a class (I think that counts, I am reading it after all) and #5 is little lists that can be taken in bite-sized chunks. The point is, I am keeping up with it. Getting the groove back. It's a good thing.
(1) Eventually, due to her drug use, I found myself doing everything except cook for her (I of course cooked for myself) and her laundry. But all house chores beyond that, as well as all finances, repairs, shopping, cleaning, gardening, and income-earning were all mine. She was healthy, capable, and able: she just didn't do any of that.
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