World Building

Reason #487 to wish for telepathy

I own a lot of books. A lot of books. I don’t know how many, exactly, but it is a very large number. Most of them I have not yet read. Some of them I have owned for years and still have not read. Some of them are even from favorite authors of mine. I have three Codex Alera novels from Jim Butcher sitting on my shelves and I haven’t even opened them yet.

And yet, in spite of the fact that I have enough reading material to last me for years to come, I continue to buy more books. Some of these I read right away, like the Harry Dresden novels or Kim Harrison’s Hollows series. Most of them, however, get added to the ever-increasing stacks around my house.

This probably qualifies as a mental illness of some sort. When I see a book with a story that appeals to me and I have a bit of extra cash, I buy it. I just can’t bear not to have it. I tell myself that I’ll get to it eventually.

The problem is that I read slowly — not “special ed” slowly, but I savor the words, building a movie in my mind. Mere reading comprehension isn’t enough; when it comes to fiction, I need the nuances and undertones, the subtle word choices and shades of meaning. I don’t think I could stop doing it if I tried.

Contrast this with my friend Andrea, who reads books faster than an optical scanner. A story that takes me 90 minutes to read aloud, she can burn through in 20 minutes. Given an 800+ page monster like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, she can polish it off in four hours. What’s more, she doesn’t seem to lose anything from reading that fast; her comprehension of the stories is as good as any English teacher could ask for. I swear that there’s some kind of Third Wave power involved here.

Anyway, Andrea is a professional babysitter/nanny/what-have-you, so she has a lot of time to read. She burned through her own book collection a long time ago, so I’ve been giving her mine. Every week at church I bring her a bag or two full of books, and she brings back the ones that I gave her the previous week, complete with commentaries on which ones she liked best and the strengths and weaknesses of each author.

It’s very helpful in dealing with my case of literary overload: by having Andrea screen them, I can find out which books to move to the top of my reading pile and which ones to put in the back of the closet. If I can’t read everything, I can at least focus on the best stories first.

But dammit, I wish I could just mind-meld with her and copy the memories of all those stories. Because I want them in my head, and I just don’t have the time to put them there any other way.