I can’t read. Wait! Let me rephrase that…

Shocking fact: I almost never read books. Don’t start yelling at me now, let me explain.

This is the strange thing about me: I love reading. Love it. When you get into a book you get so much more involved than with, say, a film – if the book is written well, of course. But at the same time I almost never read. Not because I don’t want to but because I’m such a lazy reader.

I can start reading a book, any book, and marathon read it for a few days. Then I’ll stop. Dead. And the book will sit on my windowsill screaming “FINISH ME TOMTREK” and I’ll just look at it and sigh and watch TV because I’m a terrible person. And I don’t know why. I have so many books like this. I started reading The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan when it came out last year and loved it. To the point that I was still reading it at 5am when I could turn off my light and let the rising sun let me see the words. But now it sits on my bookshelf, unfinished. I want to know what happens. I want to read the sequel. So why the hell don’t I? (incidentally I did really like the book and recommend it to anyone who is a horror fan, Del Torro’s update to Bram Stoker’s Dracula is amazingly creepy)

You know that bit at the start of The Hobbit when all the Dwarves come into Bilbo’s house and totally mess everything up and Bilbo’s having a panic attack and they sing at him? I’ve read that bit so many times when I start and restart The Hobbit. But I keep petering out before the end and it sits in my collection of unfinisheds. Heaven knows what would happen if I started The Silmarillion.

It’s not that I’m bad at the physical act of reading – that’s fine – it’s just I so rarely seem to find myself in the mindset of sitting down and having a good read. I think what could be the problem is that I would generally tend to rad in my room, a place where I would often be distracted by the other shiny things that make sounds and lights and have pictures of Michelle Trachtenberg. So what I’ve come to doing now that it’s big winter coat time is slipping a small book into my coat pocket and just whipping it out whenever I’m free, even if it’s only for five minutes. Waiting for a bus, on the train, or just eating lunch outside somewhere I can get a quick chapter or half chapter done. And it’s working, I’m already at the end of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and so will hopefully soon start on Life, the Universe and Everything, something I am really looking forward to as I only know the plots of the final few Hitch-Hiker’s books thanks to the (wonderful) audio versions.

Hopefully this will take me out of my reading slump. I’m often told by my pro-reading friends of the great classic books that they are working though and how fantastic they are, and most of them seem to be the size of a small cat. I just look at the size of the books and think “I would never even make it to chapter 3…”. Now, maybe, that can change. Now it’ll be chapter 8.