I read a book this week. Fiction. The Hunger Games, if you must know. This is remarkable because in the entire time since the first day of law school, I have only read three for-pleasure books. Those three were re-reads of the first three Harry Potter books. I tore through the first one during my first winter break, the second during the summer after my first year, and the third during my second winter break. But I read no books last summer. Zero. I couldn’t stomach it. I’ve done so much reading since law school began–cases, study aids, law review articles, treatises, Bluebooks, and more–that my eyes and my brain rebelled against opening books when I had no reason to open them. And so when a day’s work or studying was done I tended to pass time with Netflix or Hulu. I let the stories come to me in the form of others’ imaginations.
Except I forgot that I do have a reason to open books. I love reading. I’ve always loved reading. It’s incredibly pleasurable. And I forgot to remember that that’s enough.
I want to say that I stopped reading because law school intervened. That studying kept me busy. That I have spent the last two and a half years in a state of just-in-time and slightly-late. All of which is true, even if it isn’t entirely the source of my reading hiatus. During law school’s first year, I scarcely had time to sleep. I existed inside constant mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. I had some free time, but not very much. Certainly, I had to make my free-time choices very carefully that year. I had time for a little bit of yoga, and a little bit of blogging, but not much else my first year. I believe this is true. So, ok, I get a pass for those two semesters.
But the truth is that I stopped reading for pleasure long before the I even knew what the LSAT was. I don’t know exactly when it started, but I do know that by the time I was 19 or 20 I had switched from Dean R. Koontz to Hemingway and Shakespeare and that by the time I was 24 I was struggling with Lacan and Derrida and Freud. Because I got Serious. I started counting down the years left in my life and realizing that I had to start Enriching myself immediately or I would die in a state of…what? Ignorance? Which means that for the past 15 years or so I have restricted my reading to the point where picking up Harry Potter was a sort of rebellious act.
This was senseless violence and also completely unsustainable. That sort of black-and-white thinking (advancement or stagnation; literature or fluff; alive or dead) led me to throw up my hands and turn on the television (or to close my eyes and pull the covers over my head). You know what I think is true? We–all of us–find ways to simply pass time. We go for walks; we weed the garden; we post to blogs; we take bubble baths; we play gin. This week, I took a deep breath, came to terms with my mortality, and read a book.
Told you I was Serious.
