Blockhead

Books. No cable, not a lot of movies, but there were always lots of books and periodicals in my house. And Xenu bless 'em, my parents worked their way through them, from cover to cover. It rubbed off on me. I took great pride in my ability to slog through any kind of printed material. If I started something, I was going to get through it, no matter how many times I drifted off to sleep.

This was easy enough to do while I was still in elementary school, and was reading mostly novels or popular history. In junior high school, I got it into my head that I should try to become a well rounded person, and would take the occasional stab at biology, mathematics, physics or philosophy. My patience and understanding quickly hit a wall, and with the exception of philosophy, I gave up trying to understand anything scientific or math related.

Still, that work ethic remained, and I'd doggedly try and get through Plato and Montesquieu, Dante and Pound, Joyce and Pynchon, succeeding more often than failing, but when I couldn't bear to continue on with the print equivalent of Ambien, blaming myself for my lack of discipline and stick-to-it-ness.

My first indication that there was a better way to read occurred while I was reading a magazine interview with the French cartoonist Moebius. I don't remember anything about the interview, except the fact that he mentioned one of his comic books was inspired by a book of poetry that he never finished reading. I was scandalized at the time, and thought less of him both as a human being and an artist.

So I continued mindlessly plodding through the world's great literature through my years as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. Sometimes it paid off, as in the case of Foucault's Pendulum, but more often than not, well, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other.

Perversely enough, a film studies course made me realize that reading books all the way through from cover to cover wasn’t always the best use of my time. During a class discussion, someone made a comment to the effect that they never walked out of movies. For a brief moment, we all sat around nodding and murmuring our assent, smug in our belief that we were all good, tolerant, and open-minded people.

Then our professor spoke up. “I do,” he said, “All the time. When you get to be my age, you realize life is too short to sit through something you don’t enjoy.” I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At first I used this newfound bit of wisdom only in extreme circumstance, and only when watching movies.

But gradually that attitude began to seep over into reading. It started slowly at first: I finished the first part of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, and then quickly gave up on ever finishing the rest of it a couple of pages into the second part. Soon I was gleefully skimming and skipping my way through works of non-fiction, and happily giving up on novels after reading a hundred pages past the start or when I was only fifty pages away from the end.

My attitude toward finishing books became even more extreme, more insouciant. I used to devour novels by Christopher Buckley and Will Self, but after paging through their latest efforts I realized it was more bother than it was worth. In fact, my go to hell attitude has become so extreme, I realized the other day that I had finally come full circle: maybe I’d been too quick to delete Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed reading the first hundred pages or so, but as it was a little long, maybe it was a little bit like the television series Oz: something best enjoyed in small doses over an extended period of time.

Besides, if I get bored I don’t have to finish reading Quicksilver. I can stop reading it whenever I want...