1/25/2011 - the hour I first believed. . .

In high school and college, I would read during every spare moment I had.  I loved it and couldn't find enough time in the day for it.  I became an English major so my reading would count toward a goal, went to grad school to possibly learn how to write things other people would want to read.  I have boxes of books in my parents' garage, a full bookshelf in my old room.

But then I left academia.  Graduated and got a job, left the world of creative writing to enter the corporate world.  While friends from school stayed true to the course, took side jobs in order to have time to write, I chose otherwise.  Found work that requires logic, reasoning, "cross-functional expertise," as my boss likes to say, but with little creativity and little energy left at the end of the day for creativity.  I paid the bills, went on vacations.  Stopped reading.

Every so often though, I'd randomly get the urge, feel like there was a missing space in my life that needed filling.  I'd find a book, read it, remember what it felt like to finish one, and vow to make it a habit.  A few years ago, I set a goal, a new year's resolution to read one book a month.  In the end, I think I finished three.  A while back, I wanted to get a book club together with some of Sam's friends, and it was an uphill battle from the start, even (or especially) with Sam.

Truth is, reading became difficult in recent years.  It is not an established routine.  If I suggested to Sam that we dedicate half an hour in the evenings to read, he would say that he's worked a long day and just wanted to relax.  And I can't fault that.  It would sound good to me, too.  I only suggested the reading because somewhere inside, I felt like it was the right thing to do.  But really, why not partake of simpler pleasures, ones that don't require much thought, present much challenge?  So we watch TV.  I play Angry Birds on the iPad, play the piano.  Reading required commitment, a willingness to submit to the world that lies between each page, and I didn't always have it in me. 

And I was OK with that.  Still am.  

However, after I started working on this blog, I found myself not only wanting to read, but needing to.  Humble as this project may be, it has helped me feel like I belong to a community of sorts, of writers.  This feeling is new.  All those years of studying English and writing and being surrounded by writers, it took this blog, the act of working on this alone in my closet-turned-office day after day, to make me feel like a writer, more like one than I have ever felt.  

All this to say that I am glad I am reading again.  I just started Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, a fictional story of a couple in the aftermath of the decidedly non-fictional tragedy at Columbine.  100 pages in, and I'm definitely invested.  Interestingly, though, I realized today that while I enjoy the content, I enjoy the process of reading equally so: the skimming of the words, forming tentative images from those words, the focus.

Today, I got an incalculable amount of satisfaction when I closed the book after reading for an hour and saw how much I had read reflected in the thickness of the cumulative pages turned.  The increased thickness probably could only be measured in millimeters.  Still, some days, that is all I can measure my accomplishments by, and I think I'm doing pretty good.