Why Can’t I Read Books?

Over the last three years there are two detrimental changes about myself that have developed into characteristics far more permanent than I’d like to admit. The first is my ever-increasing incapability to elicit a sense of anticipation when acquiring something new in my life; the second is my continuously decreasing capacity to read and absorb books, novels in particular.

I’m currently sitting in a Cardiff city centre coffee house. I thought I’d come in early before work so that I could liaise with an entertaining piece of fiction, specifically Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere; my flatmate recommended and charitably lent it to me several weeks ago, a welcome break from the likes of Murakami and Dostoyevsky (both of whom I have unconsciously decided to neglect over the past year or so). So I’m sitting on a pleasant and squashy chair, reclining with said book whilst preparing myself for an abundance of prose-induced pleasure. I lasted all of two sentences.

Cue the move to a more practical upright chair and a reassuringly sticky table.

This annoying incapacity to absorb literature has, of course, nothing to do with Neil Gaiman; I thoroughly enjoyed the first seventy-two pages when I barrelled through them on the train home last month. It’s just that, like The Idiot, which I forsook after reading over two thirds of the book, I just forgot to even pick it up after the first read. Subsequently and not surprisingly, I lost interest.

One of the contending factors that I’m presenting as my first excuse (laziness? No!) is the possibility that certain tendencies acquired whilst at university have stuck fast; you know, you put the novel down because you’re supposed to be reading that other book for your dissertation, the one you know you’ll have to read more than once because it’s so flowery and intense. It’s the academic equivalent of what I like to call Catholic Guilt. My next limp excuse is the panic and harassment generally experienced in the final year of a degree, but as I wiped my hands clean of that experience over five months ago I have to question its validity as an appropriate excuse. Laziness it is then.

So here I am, sitting drafting a blog in my notebook because it’s as if there’s a trigger in my head yelling ‘No! Don’t try and further yourself intellectually – complain to yourself on a piece of paper instead!’ I must admit that sitting in an American chain cafe and pondering the reasons behind my impending illiteracy is not how I intended to spend my hour of freedom before work. There’s the other issue as well: the lack of child-like excitement in my life. Is it unusual for twenty-two year olds to sit and mull over such a topic? Perhaps I’m just pensive today because of a dream I had last night; it had a kind of neon military theme and resurrected in my sleeping head the phrase: ‘you can pretend if you want to, but you know it’s going to get worse.’

I used to experience a hyperactive anticipation that would usurp my Child-Self when purchasing phenomenally amazing (how I perceived it at the time) items as a child/spotty adolescent. It first occurred to me that this manic, material desire had been quashed somewhat when I shelled out just under a grand in sterling to get my Mac desktop computer last year. It is the most expensive item that I have ever purchased in my entire twenty-odd years on this earth; even my piano, which I paid £400 for, doesn’t even come close price-wise. The difference with the piano, however, was that I could hardly breathe when we clicked the ‘buy’ button on eBay, let alone when it arrived on our doorstep. I dedicated the weeks following its arrival to an intense, musically orientated affair, now subdued but still remembered with fondness.

Not so with my Macintosh, I’m afraid. No, that pure and intoxicating – albeit materialistically rooted – excitement was not present when I went instore to pick up the giant white box. Nor was it when I was carrying it home (it was very heavy, blasted thing), or when I pressed the power button for the first time and the screen gleamed at me with all of its bright, shiny glory. I blame my age; I was sixteen or seventeen when I bought my piano and I was twenty-one when I got my computer. What the gods will I be like when I’m twenty-five? Thirty-five? Sixty? I dread to think.

Not all is doomed, however. I now find my hopes clinging to possibilities far more ephemeral than the purchase of a material object, but to me they are no less thrilling in prospect. For the last few months or so I haven’t touched my savings and so have managed to accrue an impressive £70, to be precise. It may not be much but if I sustain my willpower I may be able to shimmy on up to the Isle of Skye for a week or two of WOOFING next year. One ambition at a time, I suppose. I just can’t shake the feeling that what I need is a good, consistent stretch of fresh air and manual labour. Until then I’ll just have to gaze fondly at pictures of the Cuillin Mountains on the internet.