A Reader Lives a Thousand Lives

When I was a little girl my Momma never went anywhere without a book. Some mass market paperback version of the new Stephen King, or Dean Koontz was always tucked in her purse. She bestowed a love of reading on to me at such an early age.

I poured through books as an elementary school kid. I even won a contest in 1^st grade for reading 100 books in one school year! As I became a teenager, when the phone and eventually “hanging out” took over my life, while I would pick up a book now and then, I rarely read past the requirements of my English classes. In college it was even worse. Who the hell has time to read for pleasure in college?!?! When you show up on the first day, listen to lecture, and in your first class are assigned 9 chapters……before TOMORROW? Yeah, no escaping into a love story tonight! (This implies that I always read the material for my class the next day. Sometimes I would – if something better didn’t come along. I mean when your neighbor is having a get-together, you can’t not show, can you?)

After college I would read books every now and then. But I got out of college and had a baby. Ya know, there should be a billboard in front of every high school about babies: Sleep too much? Too much time on your hands? Think about yourself too much? Desire financial responsibility for the rest of your life? Too much time NOT cleaning up bodily fluids? HAVE A BABY! As the kids got older, and would ACTUALLY go to bed at a decent hour, I did read progressively more, but I’ve always been a busybody and have always had too many irons in the fire. For me time has always been like alcohol to an alcoholic, as soon as I have a little bit, I promptly consume it.

When I started the work I’m doing now, all time for books went out the window. I found myself working increasingly more hours and, when I would have time for a book, I was reading contracts, or books on negotiation techniques. I obsess. And, when I find something to obsess over, I go all in. There’s no obsession I work at half ass. If I’ve decided it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing RIGHT.

Now, as I am older, and my kids prefer video games and smart phones to my presence, I find myself with a little more time. Or at least I am attempting to make a little more time in my life. It has become clear to me that the life of obsession, over only one thing, is unsustainable. And so I’m diversifying my obsessions.

Lucky for me, Mikey shares many of these traits. And our obsessions are very similar in so many ways. We recently sat down before the end of the year and brainstormed a list of things we’d like to do in the upcoming year. Over half or more of the things on my list and his matched. One of them was “Read more books.”

In the last six months or so, we find ourselves particularly enjoying spending hours at the thrift store searching through books. For us, owning books seems something akin to collecting antiques. Eventually we figure a book, written on paper, and bound in such an artistic way, will be a thing of the past. And we just aren’t ready to let go of that past. Whether they ever are worth anything? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. I love a good book collection – always have. And so we are building ours.

The thing is though, we love books so much, and are interested in so much, that there are times we walk out of there with 2 paper bags full of books. Since we’ve done this a few times now, we talked about limiting ourselves to a weekly trip, with a preset amount to spend: $13.05. That is the price of 5 books (if they are on the high end of the pricing scale). We decided that we will shop as usual and if the combination of the books in our hands at the end of our trip is greater than 5, we will have to start bargaining over which ones to put back. (Fortunate for me that I negotiate for a living – however he’s pretty. damn. good.)

Yesterday, after we hit the gym, we wandered over to see what we could find. Funny, when you’ve bought a hundred books in the last month you’d think there’s nothing left to want to buy. WRONG! We left a couple on the shelf (with no real bickering) and brought 5 home.

And I can’t wait to go back! It could be worse...at least this latest obsession is fairly inexpensive. And we're making reading time a priority - I've already read 3 books in the last 2 weeks!