Corrections Ignored

I hope you don’t read like I do. That is, I hope you don’t put like, say, 10 books on your Christmas list, get them and then find yourself reading furiously come October to finish up those books so you can justify putting more on your next Christmas list.

Stop your laughing. 10 Books?!? How can anyone not read 10 books in a year (please excuse any insensitivities to those not fortunate in the ways of a proper education)? Well, first of all reading is a relatively new thing for me. Not the ability to read, but finding enjoyment in it. I was never the first in line to sign up for “Battle of the Books” in school, and I think I can count on one hand the number of required books I read from cover to cover in high school. It wasn’t all my fault. Once we read an excerpt of Moby Dick that was in our textbook, and we didn’t even read all of it. It’s a shame really, that I was so distracted because, gathering from the sample of pages in the books I did read, they were probably pretty good.

Somtime during my freshman year of college, I acquired quite a taste for reading. That’s why there are 20-30 books a year that I want to read. It’s too bad that list gets narrowed down to 10 because I know I’d never read even 20. The problem mostly lies in the fact that I get distracted by other things. I like reading, but I like doodling on the web and in Dreamweaver too. I like TV, I like watching TV with friends, and I like hanging out with friends. I love watching movies, though I’ve definitely become one of those people who exclaim, “the book was better!”. Well, if I’ve managed to get through the book before the movie comes out.

To put it simply, it takes me like 4 weeks to get through a book. Not because I read 10 pages a day, but because I’ll read 30-50 pages one day, then nothing for a week. Then, sometime about the third or fourth week after having first picked up the book, I tell myself, “This is ridiculous, just finish the stupid book.” And that Harry Potter phenomenon is killing me. I think there’s a 5 year old somewhere that’s read more books than me in the past year because he just learned how to read and he has to stay current with the latest travails of Harry and the gang.

So while 5 year olds are outreading me and someone somewhere is quietly putting together the movie for The Corrections, I’m hoping I can get through the last 100 pages before it actually hits the big screen. It hasn’t started filming yet, so there’s still hope. It probably doesn’t help that I spent the last 20 minutes writing this.