A readoholic in me

What do you do inside your adobe the whole day? This is a question thrown at me wherever I go. I smile in reply without offering an explanation.

Of course, it is a very rhetorical question, of course, which does not call for a reply. Anyway, what do I tell them?

Tell them I spend my time reading.

That I am a kind of " readoholic! I may have invented a word but it does describe me completely. Me and so many others like me, I suppose, are irrevocably addicted to the written word. If there's something to read, I read it.

If someone has taken the pains to write and print something, surely we are obligated to award it a little bit of out eyeball time. And this, in a nutshell, is what keeps me housebound most of the time! Consider this, we get newspapers delivered at our doorstep every day. While other family members simply glance at the headlines and toss the paper away, I feel I must read these from the front-page to the last. And, since one does not read old, yesterday's newspapers, I sit surrounded by the sheets for hours on end every morning and mid-day, speed reading like a maniac. And then, there are books from the British Council Library on my bedside table. My table lamp burns bravely late into the night as I tackle the stack.... So, tell me, where do I find the time to hobnob with the neighbors, sip tea sitting in the warm winter sun, or snatch a siesta in the afternoon.

As for me, my mother claims that my reading habit has very early origins. It seems I loudly spelt out the words painted on the shop board, home nameplates and street signs when I was barely out of the cradle. "I should have known then," she says now, "that your nose would not be out of a book for the rest of your life!" What, one may wonder, do I do when I run out of anything to read? This rarely happens, so the question of my suffering cold turkey does not arise.

And then again, I am blessed with a memory lien a sieve. I tend to forget the plots of stories so rapidly that it is possible for me to re-read these again and again with undiminished pleasure. I forget, after a while, who married whom at the end of some stories, and who murdered the woman in the library in a whodunit. Other may not understand the compulsive reader who forgets what has been read giving reasons to go for it once again.