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Reading For most of my life, beginning around the fourth or fifth grade when I discovered the joys of reading and became a bookworm, I could only handle one book at a time. In other words, I couldn't start on a book until I finished the one I was already reading. At first, I chalked up this quirk to some kind of weird, anal retentive shortcoming. I'm just that kind of reader, I reckoned. It didn't dawn on me until just the other day that perhaps the reason I couldn't read more than one book at a time was simply because in the early days of my bookwormishness I used to check out all my reading material from the library. There, beady-eyed old lady librarians would scrutinize me over the rims of their bifocals like I was the juvenile delinquent who was about to steal their purse. Reluctant to confront them over an overdue book, I'd swiftly read it in the allotted time and dutifully return it like a good little citizen. That was before I learned to say "Fuck you" and mean it. This inability to read more than one book at a time became so deeply ingrained that it continued as I grew older, even when I stopped returning books to the library or later when I began buying them on my own. One positive outcome of all this was that it turned me into a fairly fast reader. Still, it took me nearly a year to knock off "Moby-Dick" (on the third or fourth try) and almost that long to finish "Paradise Lost," which I vaguely remembering stealing from the school library, thus becoming the only person I know who would risk expulsion for pinching Milton. This is not to say that I've read every single book I've ever opened. I never made it quite through "The Autobiography of H.G. Wells." I got to within 50 or so pages of the end before I slammed it shut for good out of excruciating boredom. I never finished "From Dawn to Decadence" by Jacques Barzun or "The Landmark Thucydides," both big, heavy tomes that could kill you if dropped on your head from a reasonable height. I only got half way through "The Romantics on Shakespeare," a collection of essays on the Bard. Some of these books have been on the nightstand for years because of some quixotic notion that they'll be picked up again and finished. But as Shakespeare himself might have said, fat chance. Then, this past summer I read some books that basically precipitated a change in the way I read. One was "The Da Vinci Code." I had not intended to read The DVC. In fact, I had determined NOT to read it. I'd read somewhere that Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher from Slovenia (of all places), reads the beginning and the ending of a book to decide whether it is interesting enough to read the rest, so I applied this test to The DVC and decided, nah, no thanks. But my wife bought a copy on the enthusiastic recommendation of a cousin, and so, with nothing better to read, I belly-flopped into it. I emerged a few days later confused. Geezus! Jesus married Mary Magdalene? And they had a daughter? And the Crusades were not really about kicking Islamic ass? For the millions of Christians who kept The DVC atop the bestseller list week after week, month after month, reading it must've been like sneaking a smoke in the church bathroom. Didn't they used to burn people at the stake for lesser heresies? Setting aside the premise, you have to admit that on a purely technical basis The DVC is wantonly wooden, totally two dimensional and practically predictable. A beach book at best. Anyway, I read a couple of other novels in the same general genre - wannabe Umberto Ecos, thrillers involving ancient books, like "The Dumas Club." It was still summer, what the hell. The final straw, though, was "The Rule of Four," which a friend loaned to me with a lukewarm recommendation. Somehow it had managed to knock The DVC out of first place on the bestseller list, if only briefly. It was everything you didn't want to know about Princeton. Four Dudes in a Coma, I dubbed it because I could never keep the title in my head. That book cured me of fiction -- for now at least, and maybe forever.
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