READING 1
Suddenly after anticipating the trip and feeling pushed to get ready I have nothing to do. A couple of nights ago I had nothing to do so went to sleep at 7. But I couldn’t fall asleep. So after a half hour of lying there I decided to read. I chose Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By The Sea. I chose it without enthusiasm, but I had just bought it on Kindle and it was the first book I ran across. I have 1000 Kindle books but I have read very few of them. I paid very little for most of them.
I have thousands of paperback book, maybe 5000. I haven’t read most of them either. When Kathe and I moved into our house on College View Drive in 1990 I have no where to put these books. So they stayed piled in milk carton boxes in the carport.
When I was young, in High School and in college I read and read and underlined the parts that touched me the most. This was when I was in India and there was no television and in the United States where there wasn’t much TV choice in the 50’s or I simply wasn’t interested. I didn’t have much of a social life so I simply read and read and read. One summer, after my junior year in college I was inspired by John Kennedy to speed read. It was a national craze for a year or two, or I thought it was. Instead of reading word by word you read sentence by sentence, even paragraph by paragraph. That summer I was employed to break open septic tanks with a jackhammer in the hot sun at $1.25 an hour so I was worn out in the evening. But I still managed to read War And Peace in four days, page by page, 1300 pages. Books were much longer in those days. I didn’t underline much. I sort of remember the story, or maybe I remember the movie. I read the complete works of T.S. Eliot in two days, or was it one. T.S. Eliot was steeped in myth and literary allusions and was very dense and hard to comprehend if you reading word by word and took time to wonder about the meaning. But I was in a hurry. I don’t remember anything at all about T.S. Eliot though later in a college English class with Miss Mateer when we read him line by line and followed the allusions I was fascinated by him and still am. But that summer I had a list of great books to read before exhaustion put me to sleep, books that I wanted to get through and so I pressed ahead.
So you can see that I was a serious reader. This continued through my twenties. And in endless years in graduate school I had endless required reading that I plodded through.
The desire to read has never left me which has led me to buying a book or two or more a week, whatever struck my fancy, for the rest of my life. The book buying never stopped, but my reading did. And the books kept piling up and ending up in milk carton boxes in the carport and then about thirty years ago, when the carport began to fill up, I stored the boxes temporarily in a storage locker where they still are and the carport began to fill up again. I couldn’t read these books because they were stored in six deep piles of milk boxes.
I know this doesn’t make sense to anyone else. It certainly doesn’t make sense to me. But it is what I did. I’ll tackle this conundrum tomorrow.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 