Reading for two

Sandy read compulsively: books, magazines, stories, cereal boxes, ads, flyers, billboards. If there were words, she consumed them. And if there weren't words, she panicked. Her idea of a tragedy was to have already read everything handy. If she walked to the grocery store two blocks away, she'd spend ten minutes looking for something to read on the way — longer than the walk itself took.

The woman was always reading, yet I have almost no pictures
of her reading. We (or at least I) just don't take photos of the norm.

She read to learn, of course, but mostly she read to entertain herself and to avoid introspection. Sandy was addicted from an early age. She came by it naturally; I don't think I've ever seen her mother more than a few feet from a book.

And that addiction worked for me. For one thing, any time I wanted her to know about something, I just stuck an article, flyer, or whatever I wanted her to look at wherever I knew she'd be. She literally couldn't resist. But more than that, I was able to read twice as much as I could have on my own.

I thought I was a compulsive reader until I spent much time with Sandy. (I also thought I was a fast reader until I discovered that she literally read twice as fast as me — with great comprehension.) No matter how much time I spend reading, there's always more that I want to read. Put two extroverts in a room, each reading an interesting book, and bingo! Two books for the time of one. There are books I've never read but nonetheless used their theses in arguments and recommended them widely because I learned so much about them from Sandy as she read them. And when I was archiving her LiveJournal entries, I discovered that last winter she gave a thoughtful and fairly comprehensive review of a book she never read. I read it; it was my critique, captured perfectly. We split blog-reading duty, each keeping track of a different set, knowing that we'd share interesting bits with each other. Now I'm trying to stay on top of both local blogs and national political blogs — and failing utterly.

My library list grows longer and longer (we always figured that only one of us needed to put a book or DVD on hold and we'd both benefit), and I am even further behind on New Yorkers than we used to be. (Note to the New Yorker: If you're going to publish weekly, it's just mean to write and edit so well that I find it all captivating, even articles on topics I have no interest in.)

I'm still an extrovert, of course, and I still share my books with Sandy. But I feel a need to read even more than I traditionally have, because I'm reading for both of us now. And I really miss knowing what she's reading, hearing her reactions to an argument, or having her share a particularly beautiful bit of prose with me.