Currently Reading... Books

I have had to come to face two facts in the past year: the first was that four years in grad school made me a little weary of reading. I used to be a voracious reader. Or at least I remember myself as such. But the second fact I've come to face is that I am no longer the speedy reader I once was. Maybe it is the lingering result of years of technical theology (though I usually enjoyed that reading) or perhaps it is just the way it is once you get out of the flexible, pliable schedule of college (oh wait... I still live there). Maybe it was because I was trying to read big, heavy, and dry novels. Maybe I have just never been a very fast reader.

No matter the reason, after I moved to Fayetteville, I noticed that I did want to read nearly as much as I had once upon a time. I had a library card. I had books I was required to read for work (i.e., I got paid to read good theology). I had a small collection from my personal library of all the books I had been saying "Once I graduate from seminary, I will read this book." But maybe I have read a smattering of those books. I used to race with the summer to see how many I could read before school started up again. But nothing seemed to interest me now that I had more time to read than ever before.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that it was okay to take a break from reading. It is one of my favorite things to do, and words are without a doubt a substantial part of how I understand the world. If you will pardon the play, they have meaning to me. But maybe I didn't have to worry about trying to add to my "Books I Have Read" list. I could watch TV, something I did very little of during college and seminary. Or I could spend more time on my own writing. Or not. There are a myriad of ways I could spend my time. But I found that I spent the majority of my time on the internet. This did nothing for me... I could actually feel my brain getting slow, my vocabulary decreasing, and my ability to speak articulately was faltering. I felt stupid, and not in the way that I have always felt stupid because I am socially awkward. I felt like I had no intelligence.

This isn't a rant against the internet... I still like the internet. After all, you are here and reading this blog post. The sheer vastness of information available is astonishing to me. Things that once might have been ignored or taken ages to get to us... all here at my fingertips! But just as I once felt the wisdom in taking a break from reading, I see the wisdom in taking a break from spending ALL of my time on the internet. Moderation is the key. And I knew I wanted to get back into the habit of regular reading. So I took a clue from a friend who once told me of his daily reading habits: when he went to bed each evening, he read for half an hour. That seemed pretty simple.

Since I'm don't always have a set bedtime (working with college students means being flexible) I made the idea fit my life a little more by choosing to start with a collection of short stories. I chose Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter stories. Most were 10-15 pages, I could read in the evening or in the hour I had between coffee with students. Though not as developed as the Wimsey novels, these shorts stories give some nice insight into Peter's personality and back story. It took me a while to work my way through the book... mostly because I was trying to establish the habit more than any difficulty in Sayer's writing or the content, so about a month to read a collection of short stories.

From there I worked my way through Alexander McCall Smith's Tears of the Giraffe, second in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. I love the way he writes... there's a quiet lilt that he has managed to convey through his prose, which makes it all the more enjoyable to read.

After this, my friend Brady lent me her copy of Kathryn Stockett's The Help. I'd been hearing this book hyped by lots of people, so I wasn't sure if it was all that good. I tend to not really enjoy the books that 'everyone' is reading. But I really enjoyed reading The Help. I intend to write a fuller post about the book sooner or later. But in much the same way that people heralded J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter as getting kids to read again, Stockett's novel reminded me of why I love to read... a good story will hook you and leave you breathless until you know how it ends.

Now it was April. I'd made it through three books and I had a taste for story-telling again. I decided to pick up Dashell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Which led to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And when I was through with that, I read Beowulf in an afternoon. So, I am reading books again. I hope to write some more in depth thoughts on each of these reads... but for now, suffice it to say, I'm pretty excited to be able to enjoy reading again. I may not speed my way through anymore, but I can still enjoy!