read between the lines

by mg at 04:52 PM on July 27, 2001

Summer, for me, has always been a time to catch up on my reading.

As a kid, I’d take my first couple days of summer vacation to do nothing but watch daytime TV (you know; catch up on “my stories,” and see how much older Bob Barker was looking since I’d last watched Price is Right), run around in the park with my friends, sleep late, chase after the ice cream truck, and go to bed whenever I wanted.

As fun as that sounded and looked forward to throughout the entire school year, it got boring quick. Come summer, New York is one of the hottest places in the world. With the humidity, the heat index can reach 273 degrees Fahrenheit in August, and we were much too poor to afford air conditioning.

So, after the initial rush of being out at the park in the middle of the day (instead of after school), and once the oppressive heat made it impossible to move, I spent all my time inside, in the dark, reading.

During the school year, I hated reading. Even when we got to read books that otherwise would be fun, like Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom, it just wasn’t fun when you had to read them. Something about being forced to do something by an authority figure, made something I normally enjoyed, thoroughly un-enjoyable.

But, once school ended, I would devour every damn book I could. I remember one summer, I went through Isaac Asimov’s entire Foundation and Robots series in a matter of a couple weeks. Those two series add up to about 57 books, of about 3000 pages each, and I went through them about a book a day.

And it didn’t stop when I got to college. I was an English Major. For some classes, I was forced to read about a novel a week, on top of all the reading I had to do for other classes. Usually we had to read some pretty interesting stuff, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thurber, all of whom I love. But when you’ve got to go to the campus bookstore, pick up $300 of book in a single shot, and then read them according to some pre-defined syllabus, it just suddenly becomes very un-fun.

Throughout college, I usually had so much school related reading, that I did no other reading for the 10 months that class was in session. I didn’t read magazines, I didn’t read newspapers (not even the school paper, which I worked for), and definitely didn’t read any books. I had trouble even reading road signs when I was driving around in my Volkswagen Rabbit.

Then, summer would come along, I would go outside, play with my friends and chase the ice cream truck. I mean, beer truck. Then I’d get bored with that, and head indoors to read. I read the back of cereal boxes. I read every piece of junk mail I got, from cover to cover, and all the fine print. I even went back and read the instruction manuals for all the electronic devices I’d bought throughout the year.

For the last month or so, I’ve been unemployed, but I didn’t read at all. You know why? Because it wasn’t summer. My brain has become accustomed to only reading for fun during the months of July and August. So, as the heat’s become more and more unbearable, so has my body’s need for reading. In the last month, I’ve already read five books. Mind you, two and a half of them were Harry Potter and the other one and a half books were Bridget Jones’ Diary, hardly what you’d call intellectually stimulating.

But, crap, it is summer after all, should I be reading Herman Hesse or William Faulkner, two authors everyone raves about, but that I’ve never been able to stomach for more than a few chapters? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the first chapter of Steppenwolfe hoping it had somehow gotten more interesting. I keep thinking that Hesse is like carrots; I hated them when I was younger, but now I always keep a bag around the house for healthy snacking.

I was only able to make it through Faulkner’s work because I was forced to. Ah, the tortures of being an English major. The entire time we were reading As I Lay Dying in my American Lit class, I bitched to anyone who’d listen about how bored I was and how I wished some coyotes would just come along and steal their mother’s body already. I didn’t make it more than about 60 pages into the book, but still managed to ace the test. Ah, the joys of being an English major and getting to take essay tests.

This summer, I ripped through the first two Harry Potter books in about 4 days. Then I got stuck, because I don’t have the third. I’d stolen the books from my mother, who is an elementary school teacher, when I went in to help her pack up her classroom for the summer. I got books 1, 2, and 4, but she didn’t have 3. As I am a poor and unemployed, I haven’t been able to convince myself spending $15 for the book is okay.

I didn’t think I would be, but I’ve become entirely addicted to Harry Potter. As I was reading the first two books, whenever I had to take a break, whether to eat, bathe, or sleep, all I could keep thinking was “I wonder Harry Potter is doing right now?”

When I got to end of book two, I was devastated. Since I can’t buy the book, and I can’t be bothered to go the library, I’ve taken to hanging out in the Barnes and Noble café, sipping my iced mocha as slowly as possible, and reading a chapter or two in a sitting. So far, I’ve made three trips to B&N, and read the first five chapters. Unfortunately, there are almost twenty more.

At this rate, I won’t finish the book until November 16, when the Harry Potter movie comes out. I’ll be so starved for Harry Potter by then, I’ll be waiting outside the theatre, days before the movie opens, with a bunch of 12 year-olds and their mothers, and that would just be wrong. Please, someone stop me from sleeping with adolescents; buy me a book.