On Reading
You know, I haven't been reading that much lately. I know that's not good news coming from a writer, but I want to reflect on how reading habits change over time.
Growing up, every 2-3 years I would spend the entire summer break reading. This cycle continued all the way until my mid-20s. When I had the 'itch,' it was time to devour 10 books in 10 weeks. When it came to reading for school, I did what was asked of me, but none of those books left enough of an impact for me to hold on to them. Looking back, One Hundred Years of Solitude was probably the best school book I ever read.
In my late teens I finally got on the Harry Potter bandwagon, reading the then four released books in the span of two weeks. The only one I never finished was Order of the Phoenix. Dolores Umbridge's sadism was waaaaayyyy too intense for me.
In college I went on a Japanese literature bender. Knowing early on that I was going to study abroad, I wanted to absorb something about Japanese culture that couldn't be taught in any class. Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy was the apex of my obsession. Looking back, it was 1,400 pages of "Well...that's nice, I guess." I got rid of all of my Mishima. I still keep two volumes of Murakami's short stories, and Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain. Sound is still one of the most haunting books I've ever read.
Another highlight of my college reading days occurred in my senior year, about two months before graduation: I speed read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in a single weekend. For me, at that moment, those two books complemented each other like steak and red wine.
During my years teaching, reading before bed was one of the few things that could 'turn off' my mind from the stresses of the day. In those days I read about two books per month. My best reading-related memory from that time was reading the entirety of the The Martian on a Saturday night after spending all day lesson planning for the following week. Though stressful, teaching gave me the flexibility to read all of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction and all of Carl Sagan's nonfiction.
But now, here's all the books I've read over the last six months:
Transmetropolitan was a great salve for my post-2016 presidential election blues.
Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck
Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi
Transmetropolitan vol. I-VIII by Warren Ellis
So that's it: two books and most of a comic book series, the later I haven't finished because I don't want to know how it ends. (It's really that good.)
Sometimes I think that the reason I haven't read as much over the last 18 months is that I've been writing full time. There is that old saying (paraphrased): read something or write something worth reading. I hope most of my writing falls into the 'worth reading' category.
All I know is that I gotta get out of this funk. I have Gaiman's Norse Mythology and Saunder's Lincoln in the Bardo on hold at the Santa Rosa library. When they're ready for pick up, I want to be ready to read them.