Please Sir, The Cat Ate My Book

It’s absolutely astonishing.  I don’t think this has happened to me for … well, a good decade that I can remember.

My to-be-read pile has evaporated.  Well, make that “piles”, because there’s the one beside my bed, the “pile” loaded onto my Palm Pilot, and the back-log on my hard drive, the pile next to my computer, and there’s always a back-up book in my gym bag.  And the odd title in my briefcase, the book on my bureau…

Gone.  I looked around this morning, wondering if someone had shifted the pile(s) out of sight.  Because I was frantically packing to leave for the day job, I had to leave empty-handed.  On the way to work, instead of reading, I tried to figure out where I might have put them.  I also raided the list on my Palm Pilot, deleted the already-read titles, and came up with zero again.  Well, I could explain away the paper books with an airy “the cat ate them,” but that means we own the only pair of electron-ingesting felines in the world.  Pippin has a fondness for lettuce and Merry catches and shreds paper balls with a vengeance, but that’s the limit of their dietary quirks.

Three months ago, my to-be-read piles were tottering, potential towering infernos.   I consciously cut back on my book buying, because I figured I had enough there to last me a year or so.  Besides, Mark kept glancing at them and muttering under his breath.

Yet three months later, they’re all gone.  I mentally went through those piles (I’ve been accused of having a foggy memory, but I’m just fine remembering book titles).  Every book that was in the piles has already been read and recycled, put on the keeper shelf or into the deep freeze for later.

Here was I, thinking I was a hard done-by, time-deprived writer eking out a miserable existence shuttling between the day job and home, and fighting for crumbs of personal time.

I had no idea I read that much.

Have you monitored how much you read, lately?  You might be just as surprised.

First appeared on Stories Rule! in October 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2005. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission, or without this copyright notice attached.