Reading

Alright, here come a couple of microposts throughout the night. I’ll be drinking (and mixing), so this might get sloppy.

My reading habits have been for shit over the past year. I used to read like a fiend back when I was still in Georgetown, which I can largely attribute to two hours a day spent on the goddamn GO Train. Over the past few years though, I’d found that movies had taken the place of books in my life, which I kept myself from overanalyzing at first but later chalked up to my being over reading somehow. I’d even semi-convinced myself that I was never that into it in the first place. But lately I’ve been getting back into it, and now that I am where I am, I can see what my problems were. One, I’d been doing all my reading before bed when it turns out I’m really not a night reader (three pages in and I’m out, or if I struggle through more I never remember it.). Two, work has been stupidly busy (this one is more an excuse for the last four months than the past two and a half years). I was either taking it home with me, or packing my nine to five so tight that I just couldn’t bend my will towards picking up a book. Movies are easier. They require less engagement.

Anyhow, all that to say that I’m reading again and loving it. I’m about halfway through The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and it’s kicking my ever loving ass. If you don’t know the premise, it basically involves a man and his son trying to survive in post apocalyptic America. They’re making their way slowly south to survive the coming cold which will surely kill them, and their days are occupied with trying not to starve and staying clear of half-mad cannibal gangs. The prose is stark, depressing, and beautiful: He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory. I love a nice downer of a book—as long I’m distant enough from the subject matter.

That wasn’t such a micro-post after all.