Tortoise & Hare Reading
I find
I read very slowly. So I have not read many books in my life. Unconsciously, perhaps,
I am studying every sentence. Being a writer, I cannot seem to read anything
written, without putting it through a microscope and examining its every facet.
It annoys my family, somewhat . . . “Are you still reading that book?” “You’re not still on the same page are you?!” “How can you
imagine you’re not mentally deficient?!!”
J
But wherever there’s writing I have to stare-read it; cereal packets at the breakfast table have had to be replaced by plastic containers.
I fall in love with the book I am reading. In the long period of its closeness to me, its depths are mined, its writer found perceptive, and the content of its message distilled to its intrinsic essence in my delicious love affair with words. But it is all because I am such a slow reader.
Books change me. If one hasn't then I must have read it too quickly. So I read it again. What’s the point of a book, if it doesn’t make me a better person? And how can it do that, unless I have been inwardly challenged? Having had to struggle through bits I at first wanted to reject?
I fall in love with the book I am reading. In the long period of its closeness to me, its depths are mined, its writer found perceptive, and the content of its message distilled to its intrinsic essence in my delicious love affair with words. But it is all because I am such a slow reader.
Books change me. If one hasn't then I must have read it too quickly. So I read it again. What’s the point of a book, if it doesn’t make me a better person? And how can it do that, unless I have been inwardly challenged? Having had to struggle through bits I at first wanted to reject?
And, to a lesser extent, as a writer, reading
teaches me how to write. So what is the point of a book, if it hasn't increased
my vocabulary, stunned me with the beauty of its word-patterns, and filled me
with a fresh appreciation of the English language.
Words are powerful things to me; living
things. Let them get into my core and I am extended to deal with them: elasticated;
made more flexible to take in more challenges to my own, potentially unlimited personhood.
Books are chisels. They chip away at the old bits of me, making me new. Books
stretch my horizons. Spin me into new orbits. Lead me into ever expanding spheres
of living.
And as to the question of velocity . . . If
‘a good read’ can be judged by the speed at which one devours it, then I am a
tortoise; but wasn't it the tortoise, which beat the hare and won the race?
At the end of the day it is not how many books
I have read that makes me new, but the content I digested that made me less narrow
and more fully 'me,' or who I am when light entered.
*
- extract from, A BOOK IS LIKE A SACRED ISLE; A Rain of
Booklight; Judith
Evans Deverell.
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