Having finished my cereal and satisfied that I have reached my daily fiber quota, I am then ready to turn into bed while I suck on a one-milligram melatonin lozenge and read a book for forty-five minutes. If I’m reading pop fiction, I can devour about a page a minute. If the writing is literary or a dense polemic, about half that. In either case, forty-five minutes is the rule for stimulating my intellect, for I look at reading as nourishment for the brain and consume books with the same diligence that I take my B-complex and fish liver capsules.
I not only read for my benefit, but my wife’s. After all, she is better served to have a husband who is well-read and intellectually curious rather than one who is complacent and willfully ignorant. It gives me great delight while my wife and I are reading in bed and she’ll turn to me and ask me the meaning of the word codicil and I will be able to tell her because my life of reading as made me a valuable resource with a rich vocabulary. Knowing that my wife relies on me as the ultimate authority on words gives me unspeakable satisfaction. I therefore consider my steady reading to be an asset to the marriage and look at it as an important rule.
You are speaking great truth here, Jeff. Looking back, I can say the one thing that made the big difference in my life was reading. I started young and read every night before going to sleep, too... and not lightweight stuff, either: at 9 I loved Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" and by 11 had read "1984" and the biographies of Edison and Einstein.
And then discovering that writing was sort of "reading in reverse" really blew my mind and has made all the difference...
Posted by: Ed | January 02, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Yeah, and I'm trying to remind myself to keep reading as I've gotten a bit lazy lately.
Posted by: herculodge | January 02, 2009 at 01:32 PM