Glorious Reading!

Man… I love me some reading.

I picked up reading again about a year ago, after running through all the old skool cartoons and Comedy Central programming I downloaded my freshman year (it took me two years to go through it all. DC++ was MASSIVE). I started out clearing away books that’d been on my mind for a while, things my brother or a friend had read and recommended. Things that I had heard of in HS but didn’t read because I had other things to read instead. And recently, things that just hit me from out of nowhere.

Somehow, you’re ‘to read’ list never quit disappears, you know?

I moved back in August to a new apartment. The most irritating part of moving was piling up all my books into a tote-box and moving it. Paper weighs a lot for some reason. I haven’t even read all the books I own (I’m okay with this though, because the ones I haven’t read are published by TOR). I was irritated about it at the time, but reflecting on it, it’s reflective of my love of reading, instilled in me by patient parents and some damn good authors.

I think I’ve gained a lot from reading. In addition to a large vocabulary and an ability to hold conversations with English majors, I think reading delivers an ability to live vicariously through characters that television, comic books, and cinema don’t, because they don’t require you to invest as much time in the work. And that minimum investment of time required scares off those with little patience and less willingness. Which is why I can usually find the book I want to read at the library.

I don’t read a lot. I’ll go through a book a month. What sparked all this is that I recently turned in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and picked up The Ecology of Commerce. I heard about Gulag after reading of Solzhenitsyn’s death (I was not expecting there to be two more volumes after the first one, FUCK that), and I’d heard about Ecology in a management class. My reading is many and varied, and I enjoy most of them greatly.

CLIFF NOTES: Reading is an enjoyable pastime with a number of seemingly unrelated benefits, including an increased worldview and vocabulary. And libraries are great places to pick up those books, because of all the people too lazy to use them.

I agree.

The perks of being a grad student: 6 month check out from the school library.

Lately I’ve been taking a liking to books about the physiology of strength training and such. Like “The Science and Practice of Strength Training” by Vlad Zatsiorsky.

Whenever I get me a good book I will read it like 8-10 hours a day if I have nothing but free time. It’s rare that a book lies unfinished in my hands for more than a week.