Book Junkie

My name is Christopher, and I’m addicted to books.

That’s the first step, right? Admitting you have a problem? When I was 12, or 10, or however old I was when Mom used to bring stacks of books home for me to read from the Hastings Public Library, where she worked, reading to the exclusion of almost everything else wasn’t so much of a problem. Well, Mom and Dad did think it rather rude when I would bring a book to the dinner table and read instead of conversing over chicken in wine sauce, but, for the most part, reading books never really got in the way of anything.

And now I have a real job, a teaching gig that requires that I plan a new lesson every night, and I’m sitting here, not crafting an assignment or a list of discussion questions. No, I’m reading Trino’s Choice.

In my defense, it’s the young-adult book I’m going to start with my students on Friday (or perhaps Monday), so this reading is kind of like my homework; I’m getting a leg up so I won’t have to stay just one chapter ahead of the students (I’ve done that before, and it’s never fun). Also, the book is actually good.

It didn’t start off that way. When I wasn’t grading papers this weekend, I was reading Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s examination of research into the mind’s ability to make split-second decisions. I’m also stuck halfway through The Scold’s Bridle, a tepid mystery by British author Minette Walters. I’m also about 100 pages into Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I started Dante’s Inferno a few weeks ago (I stalled, but I’ll pick it up again, I’m sure). I read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for about the hundredth time three weeks ago. I have Gladwell’s first bestseller, The Tipping Point, waiting for me on my nightstand, along with the next Sano Ichiro mystery by Laura Joh Rowland: The Way of the Traitor. In the past three weeks, I’ve also read the first three volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, a Japanese graphic novel about a samurai assassin and his infant son and their adventures in Tokugawa-era Japan.

In short, I don’t read young-adult books, so Trino’s Choice was something I had to read, rather that something I really wanted to read.

And then author Diane Gonzales Bertrand had to go and make Trino start to discover poetry. Trino’s street-tough attitude would have prevented him from allowing himself even the slightest interest in words for their own sake, but through serendipitous encounter with an ex-con poet who gives Trino a copy of his book, the boy’s mind starts to open. As a logo- and bibliophile, I’m a sucker for stories like that.

So I had to keep reading.

I’m not done yet. It won’t take me but another hour or so (this is a short book), but I can’t afford to stay up for another hour. I can’t even afford to be up right now. I should have my head hit the pillow so I can get more than four hours of sleep tonight. I don’t teach well when I’m exhausted. But I can’t turn in until this lesson plan is done. And that’s going to take me at least another hour.

But I couldn’t resist the logographic lure of this tale of a budding bibliophile caught between the life of a street thug and something richer and more wonderful between the pages of a book.

My name is Christopher, and I’m a book junkie. Now, if I could only get my students addicted . . .