Abandoning the Book

I have a short attention span.
And, when it comes to books - I am notorious for starting and stopping and forgetting about the book I was reading altogether.
Unless of course, the book is good.
Then I turn into a feign and stay up all night reading.
The Tipping Point was the last book I read, a few months ago.
I especially liked the chapter on smoking, but the book failed to grip me in the same way that Blink had.
Perhaps it was my intellectual love for Malcolm Gladwell that then led me to the sabbatical I took with the cousin of the book, the magazine.
I dropped mad cash on the New Yorker and a vast array of magazines, searching for enticing leads and well crafted stories that I found interesting.

I found the interesting magazine story to be a rarity and I found my attention span to be worst once I was faced with 27 story lines made up of a few hundred words apiece.
Magazines are a terrific invention, but a lot of the writing is crap.

Now, I find myself empty and longing for a story, a hefty book-like story.
A story that fills those little bleeps and blops in the day, when my mind wanders during boring conversations and I think about that book that I am half-way through.
Axl on the other hand is mesmorized by blogs.
He has a talent for stumbling on crazy blogs: home-schooling, bible preaching, housewife blogs.
It thrills him.
He’s a big computer-screen reader, and loves the instant availability of new material now that he has google reader at his finger tips.
Moral of the story is reading is fun, kids.
It’s a gift and sometimes you need a little fiction in your life.

Speaking of fun, I have a pile of books stacked in front of me and I am thinking of what kind of story I want to read (non-fiction epics are also included in the pile because I also like a whole lot of critical analysis in my life, and I find that 8 times out of 10, I get bored with literature.  I wish I didn’t, but I do, and then I crawl back to the real-life dramas of non-fiction).

And the contestants are:  (perhaps I am feeding off those stay-at-home mom blogs by sharing this mundane activity).

Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins
The Politics of Pregnancy - Merrick and Blank
Dreams of my Father - Barack Obama
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Capitalism and Freedom -Milton Friedman
Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
Rant - Chuck Palahniuk
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

And so it appears that I am really a non-fiction fan, with a pretty hilarious array of works to choose from.
I just went around the various bookshelves and book piles in our pad and grabbed whatever caught my eye.
Axl and I have a slight habit of purchasing books, at a speed where we would be reading full-time in order to keep up if we didn’t have the ability to stock up on books liked canned tuna.

At yet when have the reading-itch,  I often feel like some distraught intellectual flower child or serial killer, clinging to my copy of Catcher in the Rye because I know I won’t be disappointed  with the read, because I like that damn book.  I didn’t include it in the pile, but I gazed at it with a sigh.

word up.