Books Up In Smoke
posted by June 11 at 12:05 PM
onOver on Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Stranger contributor Tom Nissley snapped a photo of a woman he nominates for Reader of the Year. I wonder what she’d say if she was forced to choose between her cigarette and her book.
I’ve seen some other hardcore readers who might be up for the title, though. I wrote about one in Constant Reader a while back: She was a young lady who was so engrossed in a copy of The Idiot that she didn’t even notice a fistfight that broke out literally right in front of her. This wasn’t “Oh, God, I’m going to ignore these crazy people” reading; she was making passionate love to Dostoevsky’s words with her eyes. And I saw a man reading a business management book while driving on I-5 a few weeks ago (memo to aforementioned man: fucking stop it!) Not to mention people who read while they walk on the sidewalk, who are my personal heroes when they’re not running directly into me.
Comments
She wasn't oblivious to the fistfight, she was trying to ignore it. I did that once, there was a fight on a bus I was on, and I screwed myself into my seat and tried to concentrate on the book (Harlan Ellison's "Glass Teat", if you want to know). I looked up at one point to watch one of the combatants going backward out the doors with a knife in his gullet.
I've decided to wait a few more weeks, until my kid is all the way out of the womb, before I start reading the Iliad to him. Because I'm not one of those reading freaks.
I walked head-on into many a lamppost while reading and walking in my younger days. Still do, but only for effect.
Favorite reader: Richard Harris in "This Sporting Life", who cradles a hopelessly thrashed pulp paperback throughout half the film, when he's not kicking his fellow rugby players in the nuts or shouting at the woman he loves. Wish I knew what the book was; it looked like a cheap crime novel. I loved the way he held it, like he was ripping it in half.
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