"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." - Oscar Wilde

I was looking at a book by Harold Bloom the other day (yes, I'll admit it, I was looking because I'm becoming more and more of a book snob) that was called "How to Read and Why", which sounds a little like the type of book a parent would get to convince their kid to pick up something, anything. Which it isn't, I'm assuming, since it is Bloom. (Who, I've never actually read, by the way.) :)

Anyway, this book made me remember a weird thing about myself.. ready?

I don't read because I have some sort of intrinsic love for reading.

Don't get me wrong, I like to read, but I don't read because reading is an end in and of itself. I'll read because I like having read. Because I like knowing different things and being annoying by being able to say things like "Well Huxley thought.. actually, if you look at what he talks about in Black Like Me.. etc."

Actually, for years I read next to nothing. Why? Because most of what I had read up until that point could easily be labelled "junk food" literature - the fast paced page turners that you finish and realize you just wasted two hours of your life. Blegh. It wasn't until I discovered that there could actually be a point to reading that I really started doing so.
It was funny the day my Senior year that I realized that the most intelligent people weren't always, or even usually, the ones who got the highest grades. Rather, they were those who read quite a bit. Alas, such is our education system that I wasted eleven years of school before I figured this out and started picking up some books.

The reason why this is a big deal to me? It's because people always seem to assume that when I tell them how many pages I have left in a book or something along those lines that I don't like the book and I'm not reading it by choice, which is, generally, not true.

I read because I like having read things. I read to be able to know about the World. And because, maybe, every so often, reading gives me more of a chance of being smart enough to use that knowledge to tap into something, anything, more hopeful or useful than merely unconciously existing. Moving beyond Absurdism.