Fables and Fabulists

I wish I read more.

I wish I liked to read more, but I don’t.  I’m a theatre major, an actor even, pursuing a BFA in performance.  I’m not a musical kinda guy, truthfully, but I’m a pretty solid actor, and I don’t even like reading plays.  I never finished the Chronicles of Narnia.  I got through the fourth book then quit.  I made it through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, then I stopped reading that series, too.  I listened to Order of the Phoenix on audio book, but didn’t even bother with the last two.  I don’t even like graphic novels or manga.  I adore True Blood, but I’ve never even seen a Sookie Stackhouse novel in person.  I read The Catcher in the Rye one time in high school about six years ago because I had to for an AP English class I was taking and I hated that book, and Great Expectations, too.  Please don’t misunderstand me, it usually has nothing to do with the stories; I adore the story of Great Expectations, but the story doesn’t move fast enough for me in book form.  I usually just wait for the movie, if it ever comes, and, if it doesn’t, I just never learn the story of that particular book.  The last book that I actually enjoyed was To Kill a Mockingbird, and that was about eight years ago.  I literally have not chosen to read something since then, but the closest I came was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

I do wish I read more, though, because I love books.  I love what they represent: knowledge or art in one of their most accessible forms.  I love how they look, feel, sound and especially smell, because each one is completely different from the next.  I love being surrounded by books. I love being in the library, scanning shelves of books, holding out hope for one to strike my fancy because I always think, just maybe, I’ll find something that will suck me in and make me somehow love reading even if it’s only in a tiny niche genre, but nothing ever does.  I do love books, though.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that books are packed with words, they all say something different and every one means something, but none of them talk.