I wonder if I’ve started to treat reading the way I used to treat television, when I had television, just hours of staring at American homes on HGTV when I lived in Halifax, NS with no plans to buy anything. That is, as a way to pass the time. Am I using books just as a way to pass the time? I read and read and read but it feels like enjoyment has been stripped from the process. I get breathless, my heart races, and I start to feel sick when I look at my wishlist on librarything. I’ll never read all those books. Then I put hundreds more books on the wishlist and just hope that something will happen and I’ll just spend every second reading rather than being productive. But there’s not even enjoyment in that, in putting books on the wishlist.
Right now it is March (April really, but it looks like March since winter lingers). Some of this has to do with the dreariness of half-melted snow piles with gravel on top. Some of this has to do with the bragginess of the other kindergarten mothers I meet. Some of this just has to do with small town living. Some of it has to do with my general, melancholic disposition.
But am I reading too much? I’ve read 55 books this year so far, but some of those are Tesfa’s chapter books I read aloud to her over and over again to the point where I don’t even need to look at the words on any of the hundred pages. Those are books. Those count.
I’m reading because that’s like work that isn’t work, procrastination that I can say is important somehow. Expanding my brain with no carpal tunnel from clicking around click-bait stories on the internet. Tomorrow I have a two hour block where I sit and wait for Tesfa’s art class to finish that I can read some more of a book that won’t even stick long enough in my mind that I’ll remember what happened at the beginning when I get to the end. So what’s the point? If it weren’t grey, I’d stare out at nature instead for the two hours. But it’s all grey here still. The snow is so deep that being above freezing hasn’t melted any of it yet. There are piles in the yard taller than me, not that I’m tall. I’d be taller if I didn’t slouch but the piles of grey snow are still there, depressing in the yard.
So I read to pass the time, until something better comes along. Until I can fix my stories that are broken or write new ones or find new books to add to my wishlist, to add to my heart palpitations.
Summer, at this point, is purely imaginary.