How to read and why

Sorry, that title was meant as a question – it should have read How to read, and why?

(It sounds best if read in a vaguely Eastern European accent.)

I'm in one of those strange troughs when – the books I have to read (for money) piling up next to me, and the time I have in which to read them running at just above zero (along with my woebegotten attention span) – I will actually pick up unread books and flip through them with a kind of morbid amazement that such things actually get read, that people all over are doing nothing other than sit for hours in one place, reading, and that – most amazing at all – I was ever one of those people, and will one day be one of them again.

Who the fuck reads?

These are the times when, with half-an-hour or so in which to read, I will pull book after book off the shelf, looking for the one. I will veer between rejecting genius out of hand for an arguably inappropriate adjective in the first paragraph and standing in awe of mediocrity for the outsized miracle of putting together sentences, paragraphs, a whole novel. All this while the books I am actually supposed to read sit fat and formidable on the floor beside the couch or weigh down my knapsack like little corpses.

I've actually caught myself standing in my son's room, scanning his bookshelf with growing annoyance. For christ's sake, I come close to telling him, if I could get away with reading War of the Worlds over and over again, or Jack London or something, I totally would.


No, I probably wouldn't, cuz then I'd be like one of those people who read Harry Potter on the subway, and those people are pa-the-tic.