Completely Booked

Posted by Cynical Sarah on August 24, 2007

Over the last couple months I’ve started reading four different books. It started with a book I was reading to review for work. I got about a third of the way into it before I got busy with other things (also known as probably got bored with it) and set it aside.

Then I started another book that I got for Christmas. I took it on vacation so I’d have something to read on the plane and on the beach. I also took it to Vegas, where the only place it actually got opened was on the plane.
I may have actually gotten halfway through that one before setting it aside as well and getting too busy with other things to get back to it.

While I was in Vegas, I met Susie Isaacs, a prominent female poker player and poker author. After I got back, I received a copy of her latest book in the mail to read and review for the Web site I work on. I started reading it the day I received it. So far it’s a great book – it’s like sitting down and listening to her tell stories – but just like the two before I’d tried to read in the last two months, I found other distractions that made me set it aside for now and do other things.

On Thursday I was at the store picking up a few things, and there on the shelf, in all its hardcover glory, sat the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The sensible part of me thought back to the other three books I need to finish still, telling me it was silly to even think about buying a new book to start.

Of course, it was on sale, and there was no way I was going to be able to make it until it came out in paperback without hearing about the storyline and how it ends. The short internal debate resulted in adding the book to my items to buy and heading home.

I did resist starting it right away that night, and even on Friday I was busy with work and then a work party to dig into it. But by Saturday, I was ready to bust that book open and start it.

That’s pretty much where I would have been this entire weekend if not for my husband. He planned a little surprise Saturday evening for me, taking me to a lantern festival at a nearby park. By the time we left to do that, I was several chapters in, though, and completely hooked.

Most of Sunday was spent buried in the book as well. Even as I write this column, I keep picking up the book now and then to read another page or two. I can only hope this doesn’t come out too choppy or ridiculous because of it.

I’m definitely more than half way through at this point. Depending on how long I need to stop to finish up this column and finish up with the rest of the Cynical Sarah updates for today, I could potentially finish this book.

This is how I used to read books – totally consumed by them and reading them as fast as I could soak every detail in. I would be up until the wee hours of the morning trying to finish a good book, not wanting to put it down until the very end. At the same time, I would dread the end, that finality of it.

Even as I’ve tried to become the bookworm I once was, I just never seem to have the time or patience to get through many books. But J.K. Rowling’s Potter series takes me back to those days. I don’t know if it’s her writing or just the story itself, but it’s definitely a testament to these books that I can get lost in a fantasy world like I did when I was 12 even now that I’m … well … not 12.

- Sarah L. Polson

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