Faded Boxers

Apparently, less and less people are reading books. And as much as this depresses me, I can’t say I’m surprised. My own reading habits do nothing but support these statistics.

I used to read a lot when I was younger. A whole lot in fact, that my mother would worry (and with good reason) about my ability to cope with real world problems should they come my way. But the older I grew, the more things started to get in the way of my reading. Distractions of the productive as well as of the non-productive nature began to take up more and more of my time, leaving me too tired to read at the end of the day.

The desire to read is still there, just not as strong. Now, I can stand to walk in a bookstore and not buy a single book. While not having purchased a good book lately makes me feel like I’m missing out on a lot of things, I can begrudgingly admit that I wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. Heck, I have around 10 books sitting on the shelf just waiting to be read. But what can I say? Watching TV and / or going to the movies are all the stuff I have time for now.

As a workaround to my literary drought, I have started listening to Audiobooks. Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Hickory Dickory Dock were among the books I first listened to. Then I tried out books I wouldn’t normally have read like A Confederacy of Dunces.

I enjoyed Confederacy. I think it’s one of the better novels I’ve read–or in this case, listened to. But I can’t help think that had I read the book instead of listening to it, I would have had a much more enjoyable experience. For one thing, even though the narrator of the audiobook I listened to did a fine job in reading the book out loud, I could have imagined the characters’ voices to be different, and I would have probably given them slightly different accents and changed their intonations some. I’m not saying I can do a better job, but what could have resulted would have been better suited for me. And I guess that’s where the beauty of reading comes from; the reader’s freedom to mold the words into whatever shape or form that best suits them.

But the catch-22 (incidentally, Catch-22 is another book on my shelf that remains unread because I opted to watch the movie instead) about this book is that had I been reading it, I would never have finished reading it in the first place. I have a taste for fantasy novels. If it doesn’t have grand battles, and an epic scope, or at least a premise that can be easily described in 5 sentences, then I wouldn’t have given it a second look.

So what’s the whole point of this entry? I’m not sure, I guess I lost it along the way. But reading everything again, I guess I no longer feel like I’m missing out. I may not have been able to read a good book in a long time, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been experiencing some great stories. And if and when I get to finish the story I’ve been working on, I hope there are still people out there who want to read it. If not, then I better figure out a way to turn it into an audiobook.