Sheer Indulgence

Lately, I've had the blissful and too infrequent experience of lounging around reading a book -- one with paper and a cover! It was delicious. In this digital era where all manner of cultural inputs are seemingly available and simultaneously accessible all the time, the simple act of being focused on one thing felt rebellious. Go me! Go me! I'm lying around reading a book--and it's fiction, too!
Sweet-and more; it's fluff. I'm talking, if it hasn't been already, it will be, Lifetime Movie kinda stuff--(as near as I can tell from 23 pages in, that is.) I don't mean to denigrate the Lifetime people, at all. I assume they pay writers well for their work; and I would surely welcome the opportunity to be paid by them for some of mine.:) The book is just not literature, as they say. You know what I mean.

I used to get up on Saturdays and run a tub full of hot, soapy water, and settle in with a few books, something to drink and some cookies as I recall. Ah, adolescence. I'd stay there for hours, pruning while I read a few chapters in a few books; refilling the hot water. Decadence.

Now I'm straining while patting myself on the back for reading 25 pages! Times change. I don't have the luxury of whiling away hours like I did when I was a teenager. Most of my reading gets done these days while something else is going on, like commuting, or waiting at the doctor's office; it's filler reading. Reading for reading's sake has become a rarity; reading a book on paper, sheer indulgence. The author has your singular attention, there's no other book or article a click away, nor celebrity picture or Facebook post, no Google to search or Endless or Etsy to shop, nor email to check. Santa brought me more than my fair share of Kindles, but I'm grateful also for the remembrance of the connected disconnection; of being lost in words on a page, cuddling up with a good book or returning to one you reluctantly left--it's a good feeling. I shall have more of it--(and digitally too, thank you very much!)