Day 165 - Reading

I am reading “The World According to Garp” by John Irving now. It is a really good book, one of those you cannot put down once you’ve started reading. In fact, I read for 7 hours straight today. Just lay in bed and read. This is a well forgotten feeling for me. I used to do it a lot. I used to be a compulsive reader. I read all the time. Any time I had a free moment; at breakfast, after doing homework, before bed, on the subway, in a bus, on a road trip. Once, when I was about 12, I broke my father’s car’s trunk at a gas station because of my reading habits. We had this little ugly car called Zaporozhets – the most counter-intuitive car ever made, in my opinion. You had to open up its trunk to fill it up with gas. And the trunk wouldn’t even stay open on its own: there was a thin supporting “stick” (part of the stupid design, not a homemade fix). This little stick is precisely what I broke. I had the formidable volume of “War and Peace” in my right hand, resting my left hand on the top of the trunk, waiting for my father’s signal to close it after the car would have been filled up. The signal granted, I simply pushed the trunk down, “War and Peace” making me forget about the insignificant flaw in the design of my father’s beloved car (who would blame me, really?). I admit, for a second I thought it was a little too difficult to close, but I had never been a wimp against life’s difficulties, so I pushed some more, and… closed the trunk… over the stick… I realized I was doing something wrong only upon looking up at my father’s face reddening with some kind of speechless emotion. I think it was a mix of blind rage at my absent-mindedness and respectful awe at my strength.

My book addiction was further promoted by my father forbidding TV at home during my school years. He succeeded in his original plan to make me read as much as possible. Now I understand that reading is as good – or as bad – as any entertainment, but back then in the Soviet Union reading was considered a much more intellectual activity than watching the three available TV channels.

I have recently noticed that I don’t read like this anymore. All of a sudden, I can go on without a book for several weeks. To my surprise, I have only read 5 books during the months of my travel (and I am a very fast reader!).

I wonder what other changes I should expect from this time-off…

P.S. It had been a while after I noticed the change in my reading pattern, that I found out that apparently there is also a psychological exercise called “reading deprivation”. Julia Cameron describes the concept of this experiment as follows: “Words are like tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried. It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture – and other assumptions – get rearranged. Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words – long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice. Reading deprivation is a very powerful tool – and a very frightening one. For many of us, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own. Try not reading for a week and see what happens to you.”