The coffee roaster that I work for just spent a week catering an outdoor music festival. It was wild. The only down side was that all the movement and excitement and noise made it hard to focus on headier reading. The up side is that it forced me out of my comfort zone (19th century Brit lit) and into uncharted territory: the modern(ish) sci-fi novel, specifically Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
There were certainly problems with the novel – I had a hard time accepting the idea that all of the characters were children; Card seemed to think that genius and maturity are synonyms – but it was a very entertaining story that I found myself looking forward to reading every day.
I don’t really do much of that anymore – reading for the sake of reading, not to expand my mind. When I was a kid I read whatever I could get my hands on. I read great classic kids’ books, like The Hobbit and The Phantom Tollbooth (still one of my all-time favorites). I read kids’ picture books. I read preteen novellas. I read teenage horror novels. When I was ten or eleven I read a 1300 page historical novel about Sacagawea by Anna Lee Waldo. One time when my parents were visiting a family from our church I found a box full of dirty romance novels under the guest bed. I stopped reading those pretty quickly. I read my uncle’s old comic books. I read cheesy gospel tracts about how Christian rock music was blessed by devil worshippers in naked Satanic rituals (I have no idea how I got a hold of that one). If I didn’t have a book or magazine at hand I would read the packaging of whatever happened to be close by.
So why am I a snob now? When did I decide that I shouldn’t enjoy reading for its own sake?
How do I return to my former love?
v bookery 