It’s a familiar routine. I sit down in front of my TBR bookcase (yes, I finally ditched the pile and upgraded to shelves), and I run a finger along the spines. What to read, what to read? I’ve got a pretty wide selection, actually. Everything from general fiction to mystery/thriller to romantic comedy to historical to steampunk to the travels of Pytheas the Greek… You get the idea. Among this general selection are the books I’ve picked up along the way by beloved authors, both long-held and newly discovered, and I noticed, not for the first time, my unfortunate tendency to almost spurn those books in favor of others.
A strange habit, you may say. I could blame various quirks I’ve developed over the years. My habit as a child to eat the green beans first and get the icky part over with or color code the Skittles so I could eat the red and purple last. Go to bed early Christmas Eve to wake up all that quicker for Christmas morning. I have the tendency to save the best for last, but I think the more compelling reason I put off reading the books I know I’ll love is because of the other quirk I developed over the years. The same one that had my reading through the night, despite the looming math test and my father’s threats to take my books away. I get dragged too deeply in the story, drown in ignorant bliss, sinking beneath the tide of time.
Okay, so maybe I’m putting too romantic of a spin on it, but I have books sitting on my shelves, beckoning, and I knowingly resist the pull out of a tangled sense of self-preservation. “I have work in the morning,” I silently tell those sirens. “I have to drive a car on the freeway in rush hour.” That’s not something you want to do on the one hour sleep you’d manage after realizing only once the alarm goes off that you’ve been up all night reading. No sirree, Bob. But it did have me thinking what it is about these books, exactly, that hooked me so hard and so fast? What about the plot or the characters or the voice keeps me ignorant of the outside world until dawn bleeds through the blinds?
Literary analysis isn’t my strong suit. Ironic, really, given the English degree currently hanging on my wall, but I’ve always known it to be a weakness of mine. I never much worried about it until I realized that it could probably help my own writing. All I know is, somewhere in those books that wink with mischievous little twinkles in their eyes, that a lesson’s in there somewhere.
