You know what I love about Haruki Murakami's books? He's so easy to read. You get three pages in and you have to finish the whole thing.
My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.
...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.
I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction.
I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.
I suppose I could read more fiction, but I haven't moved in that direction. I'd like more time even though I spend six hours a day reading. People say their eyes get tired, but I've never experienced that. In college I used to read 10 hours a day. My wife says I'm obsessive compulsive. She might have a point because when I was an undergrad student we had the required reading list and the suggested reading list. I always read all the suggested reading too.
I know not how to abstain from reading.
If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.
I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
In the past, I used to sit there and watch every single video and read every single article top to bottom, like, ripping me apart.
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.
I finish, like, one book in a day. That's my problem. That's why Kindle is good for me, because I put, like, 15 books in it.
Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.
Once I start reading something, I can't stop. I obsessively read, which is a problem with long books!
Here's my definition of a great beach read - a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die.
Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
I didn't mean to stay up all night to finish Windhaven, but I had to!
I read everything! I would have read the phone book if you put it in front of me. I just read.
As soon as I walk down that sticky six-mile patterned carpet that welcomes you at Heathrow, I buy the Sunday papers and read the fashion supplements cover to cover. Even though hardly a single word in them seems directed at any male who ever lived, I find them compulsive reading.
I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.
I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.
When I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit.
I went off and read the books after the audition and I read all four books in one sitting - you know - didn't wash, didn't eat, drove around with them on the steering wheel like a lunatic. I suddenly understood why my friends, who I'd thought where slightly backward, had been so addicted to these children's books. They're like crack.
