The recent break from a hectic blogging schedule - which we can all agree, I was never very good at keeping anyway - has done me some good. I even remarked to Talented Hubby last night that I had not turned on the computer since the previous morning, a break of something like 36 hours. Totally unheard of.
I may possibly have forgotten this little electronic device due to a little, forgotten pleasure I call “reading”.
Several days ago, again remarking to a bemused TH, I mused that I had not read a book - really read a book, not just flicked through a cookbook or other ‘manually’ type arrangement of words - in months. I know. I can hardly believe it myself.
I used to be a seriously avid reader. As a teenager I lived in a semi-rural area, in one of a small cluster of towns of roughly equal size, each about a 20 minute drive from the next. We lived first in one of the towns and when we moved to the next town over my parents mercifully left me enrolled in my original high school and allowed me to take the bus the 40 mins there each way (we did a couple of doglegs to pick up other students). I was pretty lucky I suppose - the area was sufficiently small back then so as not to be able to support public transport, but a semi-private charter bus ran between my town and the next to take several special ed students to the region’s special school. With the bus already running but only a third full, they opened it up to students from the high school as well.
I loved the bus ride to and from school. It was beneficial for a number of reasons. First, I could snooze the extra time away. I could do my homework - the run was just long enough to produce fairly proficient work, LOL - or I could read.
I always had a book on the go in those days. As a preteen I had discovered The Baby-Sitter’s Club and loved that series with a passion, collecting the books way past the age that normally held interest. Once that fad had passed (I retained my 70 or so titles well into adulthood but eventually gave them away to a delighted young girl from a family with whom we shared a common wall in our second home) I moved on to more mature titles. As most of my friends lived much closer to the school and didn’t travel on the bus, I was kind of left to myself, which is exactly how I liked it.
I still read after I met TH and we’d started a family, but obviously not nearly as much. I do remember, quite vividly actually, reading book after book during the long middle-of-the-night breastfeeding sessions with both of the boys (first and second children). Reading was preferable to the endless infomercials on TV at that time of the night. This was all before I wised up to the idea that it was possible to breastfeed laying down. We all got far more sleep once Miss Moo arrived on the scene, LOL.
But I never noticed just how little I read for pleasure these days until last week. Sheepishly, I have to admit the internet has a fair bit to do with that downfall so I resolved to rectify the situation ASAP. Hence my day-and-a-half break. I took the kids to the library last Thursday and was happy to discover Janette Oke’s books. A friend of mine had recommended them and I’d seen them in the bookstores but with my track record with reading I didn’t want to borrow yet another set of books only to have to return them past the due date. But this time around I grabbed three titles - the first three of the Canadian West series if anyone is playing at home - and would you believe it, re-caught the reading bug.
The first book was dipped into over the first couple of days but at such an easy read, it wasn’t hard to steal 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there until I’d finished. Monday morning I picked up the second book, and early this evening I finished it. Then I picked up the third book, desperate to know what was going to happen to Elizabeth and Wynn. I did something I hadn’t done since my wild, pre-children days. I read the book straight through in one sitting. Yeowch. My eyes weren’t used to it and I highly suspect a headache will rear its ugly head in the morning (it’s already blooming now) but I’d forgotten what a rush it was to get so involved in a book that you just don’t want to put it down. I even stood at the stove tonight, book in one hand, spatula in the other. It was crazy. After not having read a proper fiction book for months, I clocked up three in five days.
You might say that this brief foray back into the world of literature has given me a ‘taste’ of the pleasures of reading again. Tomorrow I’ll log into the library system’s online catalogue and request several new books - hopefully in sequence - and when they arrive (could take some time), I fully intend to go off again. The books were so simple and refreshing. As I frequently travel about 25 minutes by bus to a nearby shopping centre for errands - this time using a city’s extensive public transport system - I’m going to start keeping a book in my handbag (purse). I have this annoying habit of falling asleep on public transport - don’t laugh, it happens! I’m the fool who nods off and their head takes on the persona of one of those ‘bobble head dogs’ you see on dashboards. Or perhaps that kid you see on Funniest Home Videos with a droopy head about to fall forward, exhausted, into the mashed potato. Thought it has never actually happened, I can imagine the folk in the seats behind me killing themselves with laughter. Try as I might, I just can’t seem to stay perfectly lucid on the way home in the afternoons. Magazines help some, but it wasn’t until I took the first book in the series out with me on Friday that I was able to make it all the way home without hitting my comatose head on the bus window as it goes around a corner, LOL. I think it has a lot to do with remaining engaged with a story - not something readily done when flitting between one mindless magazine article and the next.
So, with my brain sufficiently exercised and back in 1910, and the clock registering some ungodly time - which I’ll soon regret when I have to wake up for school prep in a few short hours - I’m happy to be back in the reading saddle once again :)
0 comments:
Post a Comment