Spineless no more!

My work requires that I read 2-3 magazines a day, on average. This leaves me with neither the time nor inclination to read for pleasure, a reality that frustrates and saddens me.

I grew up with books: when I was very young, my parents built a clever little cubby hole beneath my bed, and filled it with books. authors such as Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton, Franklin W. Dixon, William Shakespeare, René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, Georges Remi, and Maurice de Bévère all kept one another - and myself - company for the years of my youth. Between the ages of 9 and 14, I was reading about a book a day, so voracious was my appetite for stories.

Imagine, therefore, my sense of literary atrophy - given that I have not read a complete novel in over 2 years, and only 5 in the past 4 years!! I have over 30 newspaper and magazine subscriptions, not one of them frivolous, but nothing I have read in the longest time has - in even the most relaxed of interpretations - approximated a novel.

nov·el
n.
A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.

So it is that today, or rather the fulcrum point between today and yesterday, that period when nothing seems changed but yet we exchange our past for our future, and effect the transaction in the present, when PM becomes AM once more, during the 4 hours that surrounded the midnight hour….I read a novel, and awakened in myself a joy long buried.

It matters not what I read, but THAT I read. I switched off the stultifying will o’ the wisp flickers of the television, and stretched out upon my living room couch, my dog lying curled at my feet, my wife comfortably sleeping in bed…

"I have friends, whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them, for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events of the past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some teach me how to live, and other how to die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my spirits, while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in all emergencies. In return for all these services, they only ask me to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my humble habitation, where they may repose in peace: for these friends are more delighted by the tranquility of retirement, than by the tumults of society”.

Petrarch