The reading habit

Remember that Twilight Zone episode with the extreme book worm, a diminutive fellow who appears to be legally blind without his thick-lensed glasses? He lives to read and hides in the vault every lunch hour at the bank where he works. One day, he comes out to find that nuclear holocaust has wiped out everybody but him. After a brief period of shock, he runs to the library and is running up the steps excited and delighted when he trips and falls and his glasses shatter. Remember that one?

And another avid reader – I have this vivid, dear memory of my 10-year-old daughter marching into the dining area with an armload of books—nine of them, I think—plunking them on the table, and methodically reading a chapter in each until she’d worked through the whole stack.

Probably not ever nine, but I’m often reading three books at a time: something of a devotional/spiritual nature for early morning, a novel for evening, and a biography for fitting in as possible. At the moment: Christology by Hans Schwarz, Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, and Nature’s Storyteller, The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter by Barbara Olenyik Morrow.

Isn’t it a pity that one lifetime can never be long enough to read all the books we would like to read? My list has at least 50 titles on it right now, works that I’ve heard reviewed or discovered on blogs or heard about from others. This passion for reading that so many of us share has me thinking about my reading habits and interests—and just for fun, I’d love to hear about yours, too. Please.