I may have come late to passionate reading, but I caught on pretty early that a book can be the perfect shield against potentially piercing situations. Not only is reading a distraction during difficult times – whether they be sitting in the waiting room at the lab while the technicians and doctors are conferring about your mammogram or, yes, spending a few unchaperoned days with a well-meaning but colossaly annoying parent – but it’s a highly socially respectable means of social avoidance. You can’t tell an obnoxious seatmate on a plane, for example, that his obstreperous pontificating about the virtues of saccharin over NutraSweet is driving you batty, but you can tell him you’re in the middle of
A Tale of Two Cities and you simply must get back to it. He may think you boringly bookish, but if you do it right, he probably can’t call you rude.
There are people who take their socially protective reading to an extreme, of course, like a woman I used to know who would regularly bring novels to cocktail parties and sit in the corner turning pages while everybody else milled around her (I say “used to” because after a while I stopped inviting her to my house.) But I can understand why she did it. Especially for people whose daily lives and jobs and worlds require them to interact with other humans all day, a book can be a savior. A book is a way to shut out the noise of the world. It’s a way to be alone without being totally alone.
92 in the shade [fragment]
uit:
So many books, so little time : a year of passionate reading - Sara Nelso
n
____
