Skimming Along (Sci-Fi, Bleacher Butts, and More)

It was sci-fi week at my house. Once a month I interrupt my voluminous non-fiction habit (which is not to say I learn a lot, just to say I read a lot) and try to intersperse a good novel, preferably one on a list of “classics.” So I spent a couple days reading Dune, and then did, Ender’s Game, yesterday, both of which I’d never read. I enjoyed both, except for that fact that, via my skim-reading disability, they were over far too quickly.

Skim-reading is a blessing and a curse. I love it when it comes to studies, test-taking, scanning articles, etc, but I hate it when I actually need to STUDY something. Reading philosophy is akin to torture, for example. In order to get what the author is saying, you actually have to slow down and ponder each sentence, or at least read it at the same speed it would take a person to say it. I find that art virtually impossible.

The speaker at the church-gathering we sometimes attend prints out his sermons and offers copies of them near the coffee table each Sunday morning. I generally love the sermons (which, um, isn’t something I’ve been known to say very often in my life), but I discover that having them in print causes me to twist and wriggle as I fight the urge to read, to read the way my brain is wired to read. It’s like a drug, it feels so good.

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And that’s about the time that my will-power goes South and, in less than a minute, I discover that I finished—-yet it doesn’t feel so good, because I know that now I have to sit there for 15 more minutes while the teaching is slowly concluded.

As I proceed to uncomfortably shift the bony protrusions of my gluteus maximus on hard gymnasium bleachers, I authoritatively instruct my inner self. “Next time, I’ll wait.” Okay, yeah, whatever.