I’ve been keeping track of how many pages I’ve read (not counting things like reminders Ellie brings home from school… although that would increase my count significantly!) just so I know when I’ve hit one million. I’m not entirely sure I can do it before I die, but I have every intention of trying.
Well, trying-ish.
I’m not really much of a reader, generally speaking. I like books, but I don’t always make it all the way through, unless it’s fiction. There have been very few fiction books I’ve hated intently enough to put down and not even care what happens to the characters. LOTR fans brace yourselves – The Hobbit is one of them. And I’ve put it down like four times. I couldn’t tell you if I like that book, but oh how I hate the first 50 pages. Enough to make a girl cry. Or at least take an F on reading it for school. Twice.
But most non-fiction books I don’t finish. I don’t usually even start at the beginning, unless you count the Table of Contents as “the beginning”. Then I flip to whatever part I’m interested in, read that, and then maybe a little more until it references some other part of the book that looks interesting and then I read that and keep hopping around until I run out of time, fall asleep, or get a papercut. I hate papercuts.
So I’m putting some of the books on my shelf on Goodreads.com, right? And it wants to know if I have read, am currently reading, or want to read each book. They need a “partially read” category. Because I feel completely stupid saying, “Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is such a cool book!!!” when it’s on my “to read” shelf… I actually started at the beginning of that one though. And why haven’t I finished it? It’s freakin’ huge, for starters, but mostly because I only read it when I want to give my brain a complete work out.
And it’s nice to have for that. Maybe the greatest part of owning books is not having shelves and shelves of things you’ve read and can re-read whenever you want, but having shelves and shelves of things you love that, although you haven’t experienced every single aspect of them (yet), you know that they will love you back in ways that you haven’t even imagined – and all you have to do is open them.
So far, I’ve only been counting pages of books as I finish them as incentive to haul all the way through them. But maybe I need to mention my nibbles as well as my feasts.
