Odd Reading Habits

When I was in high school, one of my teachers was an avid reader, but there was a catch - he only ever read James Michener novels or reread The Lord of the Rings. Why?

I have no idea.

I found it fascinating though that someone who loved to read restricted himself to only those books. He even commented that he sometimes got tired carrying around a Michener heavy-weight novel, but he did it anyway. That was many many years ago, and maybe he eventually read all of Michener's novel and found another historical author to follow. But the thought and the image of that huge Michener novel sitting on the top of that file cabinet where he brought it in and set it every day that semester has never left my mind.

His love of Michener made me rethink my opinion of the author. At that point in my young reading life, I had read Space and enjoyed it well enough, but nothing else by the author compelled me enough to read anything else by him. Then his novel Texas came out and was a colossal sized book. At that time I was obsessed with reading exceptionally long books (one day I'll write about how I discovered Hubbard's Battlefield Earth), so Texas seemed like the perfect book to add to my "to be read" pile. My parents must have put two and two together (they had seen me reading Michener and knew I had developed a recent obsession 1000-plus page books) and bought Texas for me in hardcover for Christmas. The only problem was they also bought me the Stephen King short story collection Skeleton Crew and an omnibus of the Richard Bachman books. Considering that at the time I was practically obsessed with Stephen King, Michener was going to have to wait.

Michener is still waiting because I just never got back to that Texas-sized novel. But I never let it go, either. It's remained on my bookshelf all these years, hardly opened, and ready for me to read at any time. I occasionally lug it off the shelf, flip through those 1000-plus, view that exceptionally small print (especially in such a long novel) and ask myself if I'm ready to commit so much time to a novel about the state of Texas. I'm never quite ready. Every year I make the resolution that this will be the year I finally read it, but I also make the resolution to read the unabridged version of Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, The Satanic Verses, and reread Vanity Fair, The Mill on the Floss, Barchester Towers, and Battlefield Earth. None of which ever happens. I have too many other books to read.

It's September now. I have a stack of books I need to read before the end of the year, and I just don't see Texas moving from the "to be read" pile to the "read" pile by December 31.

Oh well... there's always next year.

Until Next Time...
Colossally Yours,
Michael