Sinful pleasures... like reading...so old fashioned...

My Dad, 'da Ven', used to come up all the way to Portland Maine, and my one big thing was he would read to me. Not doing funny voices, he would read... Yeah, the 'rents were splitting up, and the weekends were totally special, because he would be there.

And there was one book I loved, don't remember it... except I loved it, and hearing him read it to me, so I soon knew it by heart. And one day, we were all in the car going somewhere, and I was 'pretending' to read it aloud when something miraculous happened. I was probably five or six years old. The letters suddenly came together, and I wasn't doing it by memory.. everything made sense. It was so exciting. I could READ....

I don't think I let on right away, his visits were too important for me.

So I read everything I could get my hands on, and became a recluse by the age of twelve. I found my surroundings so ugly, books were my escape, and I was already on the classics by then.

The other kids were playing ball and I missed out on the coordination thing? I didn't mind. I wanted Victor Hugo, and be immersed in worlds I never could have imagined.

Which made me a very strange child indeed. The others were out in the alley playing ball? I was in France in my head feeling bad for Jean Valjean. It drove my mother to distraction, hey...

'Get off those cement stairs, you're going to get PILES' (Hemmarhoids)

I went through thousands of books... literally. And would get overloaded, and get rid of the ones I knew I wouldn't read again. When I moved to Europe, I dragged all the ones that were current, about four hundred, in a big box and gave them to my friend John, and said, 'Just throw away what you don't want, I can't ship them, it would cost a fortune.'

But I kept on reading, and averaged about seven a week, some of them large tomes. Until.... I became disillusioned, because no one seemed to be telling me anything new. And got pressured at work, there was no more time on night shifts in winter to do one of my 'comparative' reading in the middle of the night.

And my eyes got weaker, so I sorta stopped.

But I do have a current sinful pleasure. When my game is running, and if the server is overloaded and a new 'realm' is being prepared... instead of cursing and watching the loading bar on the screen, I returned to the Harry Potter series.

Beginning with book one. So while it loads, I read a chapter, really savouring it. The chapters are short, btw. When I first got them, I speed read my way through them like a junkie who'd just gotten a long-needed fix. Now it is just chapter for chapter, and the story is very rich in small details, and the description is wonderful.

Am on the middle of the fourth novel, 'The Goblet of Fire'. It is so pivotal to the entire story, ending with the physical return of the horrible Lord Voldemort. The film was good.... as was 'The Prisoner of Azkaban', but the novel is so long and there was so much left out, it is a veritable pleasure to re-read it. There was nothing about Dobby and Winky in the film, but it was important in the book, and it was Dobby who gives Harry the weed to breathe under water for an hour for the second task, not Neville.

There is so much detail there. Reading it slowly makes me appreciate it so much more.

I hope children will learn the lesson that tolerance is good. The Rethugs have already damned it to death and banned it from libraries, which made me read it in the first place. I'm sure that they think it is subversive and a danger to so-ci-ety. Or what they think counts as one.

It's a beautiful piece of work, so it is a sinful pleasure to re-read it. When I'm through, I will probably go back to Proust and get through it a third time. It's a masterpiece, and fondly remember an evening with Bob and talking and talking in my beautiful kitchen, and so into it. I think it surprised him that I knew it so well, but, Peter had given me the set of 'La Recherche du Temps Perdu' in German translation, an excellent one. Despite the fact that one sentnce could run for over a page and a half, which is strenuous.... I loved it.

So am now on Rowling. Sue me.