I started reading again after about a 6 or 8 month hiatus. Well, that’s not strictly true… there was one book that I’ve had for quite a long time which I’d read off and on, but it was the sort of novel you can only read a few chapters of before you just have to put it down in weariness. Good book, but difficult to stay interested in it. That book, more than anything else, was why it’s been so long since I’ve read consistently. I really don’t like reading two books simultaneously, and I really don’t like picking up a new book without finishing a previous one… in fact, there’s only been one book I just quit reading cause it was so awful. Can’t think of the name of it.
Anyway, in the past week or so I tore through the latest Harry Potter, the latest Jordan, and the latest Goodkind (which is a signed copy, incidentally. Woot!). At the moment I am striding through Ursula K. LeGuinn’s fifth book in the somewhat inappropriately titled Earthsea Trilogy. Pretty good stuff, but sort of a wader rather than a tear-through-the-pages book.
Man, I’d totally forgotten how awesome it is to be excited about reading.. anticipating the end of the workday to go home and read, constantly thinking about what’s going on in the story, being excited about what’s going to happen next. I can’t believe I’d forgotten how enjoyable it can be to get caught up in a story. Even the Goodkind novel was exciting despite the fact that he seems to channel Ayn Rand every 5 pages.
In the process of all this it’s struck me how amazing reading really is. One of the things that’s fascinating to me about reading is the “getting caught up in the story” aspect. Functionally it’s just inexplicable. If I think about what I’m doing — reading — it’s just descriptive words on the page. If I just read it really is a sort of immersion into the text. I don’t necessarily see pictures of the things described, it’s more like the text is interpreted and sent directly to the short-term memory, then to the long-term. Thus, it’s almost as if my mind treats what I’m reading as if I’ve experienced the events in the book; and my actual understanding of the text comes more as a function of remembering it as a past experience of my own rather than constructing an internal representation, like a movie.
Basically, I’m trying to figure out how reading actually works. It’s perplexing.
