March 6th, 2012

my brain is full

I’ve always had a “book” problem, one that caused me to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and suffer the next day… the need to finish reading whatever I’ve started. Perhaps I have a problem with delayed gratification (haha), or I’m just impatient, but once I’m into a book, I have an incredibly hard time putting it down – even to sleep.

When I was a kid I would use a flashlight under my covers, trying to soundlessly turn pages so as not to alert my parents.

When I moved out east, I would leave my lamp on, tea (or something stronger in hand) and read to my heart’s content.

By the time the Porkchop moved in, I had slowly begun to keep better hours, preferring to read a book in two nights and get enough sleep to prevent zombie-fication.

When I was pregnant I switched back to finishing in one night – I couldn’t sleep well the last few months anyway, might as well do something.

When the Peanut came, reading became harder. Between work and sleep, my free time was nonexistent. Occasionally I would buy a few books and read them over the course of a week, chastising myself daily for staying awake until 2, knowing full well I’d need to be up by 6 or 7.

A couple of days ago, after an idiotic decision to drink a latte at 4PM, I was reading an article in bed around midnight that mentioned an interesting book. I perused it on Amazon, swiftly downloaded it on iTunes and read until almost 5AM.

Two days later and I’ve purchased the entire trilogy and am halfway through the final book. The author has some serious echos issues, which means I think I’ve been speed reading roughly half of each book (page count: 900, 1200 and 1300), but getting to bed between 2-4AM.

If this was the good old days, I would’ve purchased the first book and waited several days before purchasing the second, and so on. But it’s 2012 and you can download a book in less than a minute.

eBooks might very well be the death of me.