Down from the Mountain

I just accomplished something significant in my life. Now, it’s admittedly not really the kind of thing that you would think. No, I didn’t get a novel published, a record contract, nor was I discovered by the New Yorker and asked to write editorial pieces or anything. It was none of those things and yet it was big: I finished reading a book.

Yes, I know, your scratching your head, aren’t you? Well, I am too a little. What book was it, you ask? It was Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain”, a book that I started, to the best of my memory at least, right around 2003. Quite frankly, I really don’t remember when I started it but it was at least seven years ago since I know I began reading it before I moved out of Phoenix.

Why did I even start reading this book, you ask (in case you’re wondering, yes, I CAN hear your thoughts from here!)? In truth, you’re correct in thinking it doesn’t seem like a book that I’d normally read. Well, it isn’t. I acquired it back probably ten years ago when I was joining and promptly cancelling memberships from book clubs and getting a small horde of books for next to nothing. Somehow this novel ended up in that pile and promptly sat on my shelf ever since. Considering that I can’t remember when I started this book, I most certainly can’t remember what it was that I read before it. Nonetheless, I’m relatively sure that I was kind of out of available books to read and so I settled upon this one which had become a sort of fixture on my shelf, kind of resembling an artifact more than something useful.

The book never really gripped me that much but yet wasn’t so terrible that I wanted to stop reading it. I know I read it quite a bit when I was living in my interim apartment when I first moved to Minnesota but for some reason after that I promptly stopped. It then became a sort of taboo item, something that just seemed weird to pick up and read after not doing so for so long. The rest is history. Years passed and until just recently, upon finding some books that I truly wanted to read, I felt that I first needed to finish my unfinished business and cleanse my book constipation period for good.

The culprit of my literary constipation

Some of you may know that I do a bit of writing here and there. I don’t, however, do a ton of reading and that always throws people for a loop. What kind of writer doesn’t read, right?! Well, I don’t and I can’t really explain it myself. I most certainly read more when I’m actually working on a writing project since I use books as a way of giving me formatting ideas and such. Since I haven’t really written anything creative in a long time, I guess reading just fell off of my radar. There are some other reasons that I won’t go in to here as well. I’m definitely not an avid reader, though, even when I’m “reading”. I know many people that crank through a book in a matter of a day or so and my usual turnaround is a couple of months. To date, I’ve read only one book from cover to cover in one sitting and I felt that was a major accomplishment in my life, even if it was only 250 pages or so.

And so, after nearly a decade, I just turned the last page of “Cold Mountain” yesterday. Ahhh…relief. For once, I feel like I truly accomplished something, even if it is totally irrelevant!