with all my heart

Have you ever wondered about your own personality? Your big and small habits and your little quirks and basically how you came to exhibit those or truelly call them your own?

I have recently come to rediscovered one of my worst weaknesses: The failure to resist a good piece of literature and my complete loss of self-discipline when it simply amounts to stopping to read.

I have dearly suffered from this addiction as a teenager. I kept two heaps of books in my room, one read, the other unread books and i like to watch the daily change of height of my personal twin towers. One of the peaks of my immersion in books was definitely 'Lord of the Rings'. I must have been fourteen i think. Someone was said to have finished all three parts in two weeks. That made me very determined to finish it off in less then that. And even at that tender teen-age what i had set my head on, was going to happen. The only problem i was facing was gettin enough reading time out of the twenty-four available daily hours. The two utmost hinderances being the necessity to sleep and my obligation to attend school. At that time the only classes i ever bunked were sports which i hated with ferocity.

Actually i did take books with me to school but then i found reading in class never gave me the pleasure i expirienced reading at home. So when had started the first book of the trilogy i forgot everything. Maybe i need to explain a little more. I lived in the books, it felt as if i was there rather then here. The times i closed the book i felt like visit to other-world. I ate, i slept, i went to school but the only focus was, when next i could spent time on reading.

The other day i saw a guy reading a book in the street while walking. I can remember reading while bicycling. I was irritated with every single word my mom demanded to talk to me. I tried to keep my replies as monosyllabic as possible. While she was addressing me, i was at all listening but reflecting on what i had last read and how the story would continue. I actually felt with the characters. Everything was so amazingly real.

When i visited my friend, who had lend me these books, i tried to share my feelings with her but realized, though she was two years older then me, that the Lords of the Rings didn't have half the spell on her than it had on me.

During nights i read most fervently. Maybe you know this feeling when your hands become numb from holding a book. I lay in my bed and my body started aching from being fixed to long in an unmoved position. But i felt angry with myself for this physical distractions as i seriously tried to block out all but the book contents.

I can vividly remember blocking out hunger, pain, sleepyness and the need to use the bathroom. My favourite argument with myself being: i'll just finish this chapter, then i ll go. When i finished it, i thought: i'll just read a couple of sentences from the next chapter and see how the story continues. So actually i never stopped at all.

Finally it took me ten days for all three books including two weekends of non-stop reading and then i was done. It was weird to be back after that. It felt like loosing a group of dear friends and another world on top. I was sad and i felt lonely, coming back into my own life as a stranger who had gained a different point of view. Details i had never thought about or trivialities i had never cared about stroke me suddenly as odd. I decided to change someting about my outside, so i visited my friend and made her spontaneously cut my hair from waistlength to earlobe. My mom was shocked. The cut-off hair i gifted to a friend who had asked for it, whenever i would have the length cut of. He displayed it openly in his room tied to a heating pipe. He used to joke about how he had descalped me.

All in all, i used to be a manic reader. It definitely amounted to a good loadful of escapism.

Outgrowing my teenage years, i heavily reduced the reading practise, but i never completely grew out of it. But i was always aware how starting a good book i would get tempted to forget plainly everything around me.

During my exessive reading, i learnt to read fast, no matter if the books where in my native or english, that simply didn't change the matter at hands.
So when i aquired books for reading the main priority was length. A book under say 700 pages was non-considerable. Around a thousand seemed just the rite length, though i can tell you the actual size of a pocket book this length makes it physically not very convinient to handle! But on the other hand a book of 200 pages would be finished in an evening or barely cover two days, not even a weekend could be nicely filled with that. They used to be finished before they really started according to my judgement. The characters not becoming my friends because they had departed before i would have really time to get to know them.

I fixed myself on epic novels for some time. I particularly liked them, when the historic background was well researched and the imminent love-stories not occupying to much of the foreground of the story.

So why did i get back to all these old stories really?

I have started reading again. I mean to say real reading, not the weekly half-scientific magazines i have read for a couple of years now. Neither my long term Dickens project, where i have slowly but surely chewed myself through the 700+ pages, chapter by chapter, night by night, very differently from the notorious way of reading i used to do.

No explanation comes to my mind, why i suddenly started to read three to six books at a time. I can hardly finish one book, when two or even three related books will be dropped on me by friends or i would be heaped with recommondations for further reading.

And the old tune is back, i can't stop reading. There's not even the need for a good story, i read non-fiction books aswell these days.

But trying to make a full circle with the beginning of this post, or rather make the serpent bite her own tail, Ouroboros - as my last read taught me - i never used to feel guilty about the time spent reading, as i thought it was well spent but nowerdays i do feel guilty. I can't indulge anymore in disappearing between the pages of a book. My 'real' lifes grip has become to strong on me and it holds me back from getting immersed in the stories as i used to, forgetting all around me.

Maybe that would be one of the advantages of retirement, when the reckless non-stop reading can start again. The sometimes almost painful self-denial of an enthusiast reader, who becomes more than a peep- hole voyeur on different accounts of worlds and environments.

Anyway...so long farewell

my bookworld calls ;)