Thursday, February 11, 2010

Every once in a while, when the numbers align and circumstances lock into place, I find myself reaching for a book, then going one step further and actually opening it. But it doesn’t stop there, oh no! In rare instances I proceed to look at the printed word and, yes, read. The last time this happened was in 2008 and now, two years later, another reading kick is close at hand. It may have already begun, in fact.

Now, I scan the news daily, and sites like Consumerist and Urban Dictionary are mainstays. I’m lettered, you might say. Books, however, are a different matter. Perhaps it’s the ceremony of acquiring them–the wait from Amazon, the drive to the library–that transforms them into veritable events. They ask of you a level of effort that far outpaces what you commit to Hulu or a video game and, let’s be honest, after 50 pages of anything those tiny letters start to get boring. Certainly I’ve heard of people tearing through Harry Potter novels or downing the latest tome of business knowledge in a single sitting. When I think back to A Confederacy of Dunces, though, a book I very much enjoyed, I remember trudging through it in 30-page increments.

Fiction is one thing, but non-fiction? I’d much rather have that knowledge beamed directly into my skull, but more on this later. Since we’re on the topic of beaming information, let me be clear: I’m avoiding e-readers for now. They’re slick and convenient, sure, but if I must consume a book, I’d much rather hold the real thing. The heft, the paper stock, the progression of pages–there’s a tactile appeal to it all. And the title sitting on my desk right now, oddly enough, is the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual, a relic from a journalism class I had the pleasure of dropping in college.

It’s kind of like reading the dictionary, obviously, and I’m not tackling it cover to cover. That would be crazy. I’m randomly flipping through it instead, learning about everything from agricultural parity to fair use to libel of the dead. Fascinating as all this stuff may be, the manual really became valuable when it drove me to a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, which led to a mess of multi-page articles. I’m on my way to finishing the whole issue, so I can only imagine what’s next. Perhaps a written work that contains one-, two-, three-, maybe even four-hundred pages? The problem with zapping too many ideas into your brain is you become, at best, a repository of half-baked thoughts. That’s what I’ve been doing the past two years, with all my favorite news sites, and this may partly explain how I got into this mess. I forgot how to savor something.