Reading Is Fundamental

Hi My name is Jim.

I am addicted to reading.

I have read millions of words in my lifetime and unless I can join a group for reading addicts I will read millions more. It started out innocently enough. A few Dick and Jane books. Some comics. Then I started to depend on my older brother’s Hardy boys collection. I burned through those and then I discovered the Library. In no time at all I was making weekly and sometimes daily visits to those stacks and my habit was full blown.

Now I read almost every waking moment. If it’s not a newspaper it’s a magazine. If not some articles on-line than it’s a book. If I am eating breakfast it’s the cereal box.

Here is another disturbing fact. I have 67 books by my bedside. Most of them have markers in them that show I have read at least some of them. I have ten books that I am currently actively reading. This drives my long suffering wife nuts. She can’t understand why I don’t finish one book and start another. To be honest I don’t know the answer to that one myself.

The top ten include books by Dave Barry, Lewis Grizzard and Patrick McManus. These guys are really funny writers and I have more than once laughed so hard when I am reading in bed that my long suffering wife will awaken and give me the sigh. You know the sigh. It’s the one that says “You are a crazy man and should be in a straitjacket in a rubber room.” It’s pretty amazing what can be communicated in sigh, isn’t it?

Here is the rest of the list of my bedside reading. A biography on John Lennon’s life, a couple of books written by Astronauts who have gone to the moon, a minute by minute account of a single day in the Vietnam war, a science fiction novel called “The Forever war”, a story about the West Memphis three called “The Devils Knot” and a book about an animal emergency room. To say I have somewhat varied tastes in reading material would be like saying Donald Trump has a little money.

I bring books pretty much wherever I go. I think the worst form of torture for me would be waiting for the doctor to show up in the examination room with nothing to read. I have taken to reading the diplomas on the wall when I have forgotten a book. And oh yes, when the long suffering wife and I took a long driving vacation I brought along books on CD. She put up with it until I played a Stephen King novel read by the author. Stephen tried to do various character voices. Suffice it to say Stephen should stick to the writing.