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Monday, June 15, 2009

The Book Stack

When my mother was still alive, she had a particular habit -- one that involved books -- that use to drive me crazy. Next to her bed was a veritable library of reading material. She had books of different topics, sizes and conditions. Almost every night before retiring, she'd grab one or more of the books and start reading.

Now, I certainly wasn't bothered by the fact that my dear ma was an avid reader. Learning has always been a top priority in my family. No, what bothered me was the fact that she would simply pick up a random book.

You have to understand that in my peculiar routinized way I had this very rigid conception of how one should read a book. You had to start at the beginning and read the book in the order it was presented. Of course, it should go without saying that you could only read one book at a time.

My mother didn't live by these silly rules. She'd pick up a book and -- heaven forbid -- start reading chapter 6 or page 184! She might never read any other portion of that book.

Here we are many decades later and my book stack resembles that of mommy's. I probably have at least a dozen books within arms reach. One night I'll read Spinoza. The next night it's Confucius or the Tao Te Ching. My decision to decide which book to read is based mainly on my mood at any given moment (shades of mom).

And it's a good thing that I broke away from this highly routinized method of reading. Until my second stint in college, my weird reading habits had a lot to do with the fact that, despite having near genius intelligence (that's what the various tests indicate -- but what do they know?), I barely achieved a C average.

Unlike many of my fellow students, I wouldn't allow myself to skim the text. I had to read every damn word and I'm a very, very slow reader. I almost never completed my reading assignments and this showed up in my test scores. I would generally ace the portion of tests which coincided with as much as I had read and fail miserably on the rest.

I now realize that my Asperger's played a key role in this whole scenario. Because I have an organic difficulty in recognizing inference, I didn't want to take the chance that I would miss reading a key concept or definition that would be utilized later in the book. So, I read each page and chapter verbatim.

It took me nearly 30 years to realize that, if by skimming I ran across a concept or definition that I didn't understand, I could always go back through the text to pick up this kernel that I had missed previously. Once genius boy figured this out, my grades shot up during my second undergraduate and later graduate terms. Instead of floundering near the C level, I graduated near the A level.

Now, if I could only break away from my routine of only allowing myself to read in one specific room in the house...

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