expansion.

The books! The books, the books, they're piled everywhere, sometimes lined up neatly in alphabetical order by author, but they're only pretending because another pile of disorganized books sits on top of the line. Someone put in my head the idea of spontaneous reading, the idea of picking up a book and deciding to read it because the cover looks interesting or because an author you like reviewed it and liked it. Spontaneous reading, the thing that keeps me in the book section of my local Goodwill(s) for half an hour at a time, adding to my stack that will be my next month's reading for only three dollars.

And I read fast.

I tear through the books, even the ones that are kinda slow that make me feel like I'm missing something (because they must be good, so-and-so on the back cover says so). I come home and sit for two hours on my tail after having sat on same said tail for a previous eight hours at work. Even as my hours drip by slowly and I mourn the lost chances to be productive, even as my waist expands from so much sitting on the tail, I can never count reading time as time lost. Perhaps if I were reading crap, then I could, because there's an awful lot out there that I won't have the time to read, what with death and all, and I bet some of it is good. But no, most of it is good, this spontaneous reading thing hasn't steered me too wrong. It is productive, though it only contributes to the expansion of the waist, it is the expansion of the mind, and this way, I can hope to catch a husband who won't be opposed to loving a fat wife with a book in her hand. Or in this way, I can hope to never have to worry about having a husband at all, making more time for reading before I run out of time for everything.

Used books come with bookmarks and dog-ears all ready and made for you. An old scrap of paper, a receipt from a college bookstore, a turned-down page fifteen pages in that makes you wonder why whoever it was didn't get very far. Perhaps death got in the way, or maybe something more likely, like children or work or waist expansion. I read them spontaneously, not having to like them very much at the end or even in the middle, because it was only a quarter, only fifty cents, only a dollar for hours of entertainment, phrases of which I can carry around in my head for years to come, to ponder until I finally figure it out and how it really all applies to me.

I feel like I'm getting it, you know, the deeper meanings, those vague symbols, the underlying themes that your high school english teacher told you about which seemed crystal clear once explained in class, but you knew you could never have extracted that from the literature yourself. Me, always lost in the little secret that I could never find the symbols on my own unless they were bright and glaring and it all seemed to vague and who really knew what the author could have meant anyway? Now, just a little bit at a time, maybe? I'm getting it?

I read like a scientist, but I'm trying hard not to. Someone accused me of that once, and I was confused because I didn't think it was a bad thing at all. I want to just blaze through, picking up the important points that I'll need to know and missing on the implications that are too subtle for my skimming eye. Why these authors can't just say it, I don't know, but I want to understand their game, because I think that there may be something important to me hidden in there if I can just find it. Reading, I'm irritated to find, seems to take practice, and here I thought it was something that I had down. But finding those little pieces that the author snuck in for the reader who cares to find it, being able to figure out for myself what is good literature and what is not without having to be told, that is my aim. If I can't do that, I'll just have to join a gym.