Taking a chance with reading

A friend sent me a link to some fan fiction that I have been enjoying very much.  He sent the link in such a way that I almost deleted the message without opening it – it looked like so many other fishing email messages I get that appear to be from someone I know.  It would have been my loss… and yes, I chided my friend for composing his message in such a way as to give me no indication that he was really the sender. 

The book is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.  You always take a chance with fan fiction, but this has been worth the read – if you are at all scientifically minded.  It will take me a while to finish what has been written but the author (Less Wrong is the pen name) keeps me entertained with at least as many quirky (but more plausible) twists than in the original books.  My wife finds it an affront to all that is holy that Harry Potter finds Ron as annoying as the rest of us in this version of the book.  I had to stretch the limits of my imagination in J.K.’s version to imagine those two as fast friends…

I don’t get a whole lot of time to read anything anymore.  Something seems to be broken within me and I fray quickly in the evenings.  When both of the youngest kids are home I keep to the practice of reading to them before bedtime, but that reading is for them.  It hardly counts but it hopefully reminds them that they are loved.

I don’t find as much enjoyment in reading as I once found either, and this may help account for the reduction in reading, although it may also be a debate over the chicken or the egg.  I want to be held captive again.  I want to feel changed by reading.  I want to feel compelled to finish… just… one… more… chapter regardless of the lateness of the night.  I know that there are still magical kingdoms for sale, enchanted swords, dragons to ride, and plenty of adventures right here on planet earth as well.  So many books have become part of me that I can’t begin to list them all, and yet, when I go to the library and walk the shelves I do it with a mounting feeling of frustration.  The gems are in there somewhere but I can’t take time to mine for them.

Yes, yes – I can hear the advice of my sister “Go back to the classics”.  There are plenty of really good books that I have not yet read, and a list of books that I plan on reading someday.  The reason that I am not delving into time-proven literature is that this kind of reading takes effort.  If I do not read carefully, I get lost in the complexities that make these classics worth reading in the first place.  Add in a bunch of Russian names and it becomes totally hopeless.  Hopeless equates to Worthless and I am looking for something valuable.

I don’t see a solution, at least not in the near term, and this is as frustrating as anything.  I can, and will continue reading The True Blue Scouts of the Sugar Man Swamp, but it is not what I would choose.  I will read, and I will wonder how the book will resolve but never once will there be any doubt of a successful resolution.  When this book is finished, we will begin another and another until they decide that they are too old to be read to at night.  We will share the memories of those books I read to them and I will know that the time was well spent.

 

That will have to be enough for now.

 

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  One  Man