Life, actually…

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SOMEDAY I’LL GET AROUND TO READING A BOOK

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“I’m thinking about getting back into reading,” a customer says thoughtfully. He is slowly stretching his hand toward a provocatively-titled book. He never quite touches it, as if doing so would signal a commitment. He withdraws his hand and his thought.

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“I don’t have time to read yet,” explaining that work and school and media constantly get in the way of something extra-curricular and frivolous like taking time to read.

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I try to hide my nerdy dismay at the thought of never reading for pleasure. My disapproval will in no way be helpful.

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Each day at the bookshop words like these issue forth from the mouths of customers and patrons and browsers and tire-kickers and booklovers and bookdeniers.

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“Oh, man, I have read every book in that series. Now I’m re-reading it until the next sequel comes out.” This from an enthusiastic fan of bookworld. She lives for each page. She is excited about it.

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So, these are two of the extremes I encounter at my shop. There are gung-ho readers and there are impotent non-readers. That’s the world I live in.

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Now and then I attempt to inspire a nonreader. I’ll open a Robert Service title and read lustily, “There are strange things done in the midnight sun…That would make your blood run cold…But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.” Sometimes this does the trick. A true story about cremation that scares you and makes you laugh at the same time. Some great writing!

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If a nonreader is wavering with signs of curiosity I’ll hand him a Calvin and Hobbes collection, “In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.” Calvin says that.

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Or, a page from Dylan Thomas will sometimes perk up a bored browser, “Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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How can anyone deny the childhood wonder evoked from this passage?

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And there is always Ray Bradbury, thank goodness: ”Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hand away.”

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Best to quote Atticus Finch if all else fails: ”The one thing that doesn’t bide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

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Hey, these are cheap thrills. These passages and thoughts are sleeping between white pages, awaiting resuscitation.

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Once in a while, once in a blue moon, every now and then, just when the stars are in their proper places, I do manage to slip into someone else’s imagination a drop or two of inspiration. And even more rarely, the nonreader begins to show signs of curiosity, signs of interest. Most rarely, a reader is reborn.

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And my work is done for the day

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© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed