Knee Deep in Books

I got four books in the mail this past week. Four. Well, some came via Fed Ex, so “mail” isn’t quite appropriate. And of course, I bought two yesterday on my Writer’s Field Trip. 😀 Add to this the fact that I still have out a book from my church library.

The thing is, I’m not a fast reader. Now if I set aside my other work and started in on all these books, maybe just maybe I could get through them in a timely fashion. Fortunately I have several weeks for most. The hardest for me are the books I have no deadline to read. I mean, they keep getting moved off the top of the To Be Read pile.

What’s a slow reader to do?

Honestly, this is a new experience for me. Before I became a writer, I usually devoured books, but then I only read fiction during the summer when I wasn’t teaching and I could stay up late at night without suffering serious repercussions.

Someone once described readers as nibblers or gulpers. I always described myself as a gulper because once I got caught in a fictive world, I didn’t want to leave it. But now I find myself caught less and less frequently, and of all the strange things, I find myself content to be a nibbler.

Except nibbling may not get all my books read on time!

The thing is, I still long to be caught in that rich, real world created by imagination—mine working with the author’s. Once in a while I still am caught, not wrestled-to-the-ground-in-an-inescapable-grip caught, but snagged a bit, and I turn into a gulper. I just come up for air a lot sooner than I used to.

I can’t help but wonder if becoming a writer hasn’t given me a choosier palate, so I’m not as ready to gulp as I once was.

Somehow, in the next couple weeks I have to at least find the bottom of the short stack—before more books start to arrive again.