DEAR - Drop Everything and Read!

I've never, ever, ever understood people who don't read. Strangely, kids are much more honest about it. "I just don't like it. I've tried it, but I can never finish." I can respect that brand of open admission much more than I can the lame excuses some adults give. My favorite is "I don't have time." For some reason this is almost always delivered by a bubble head in the very midst of wasting time on something stupid.

Wow, Barbi Jo, you have time to compare fourteen different shades of pink nail polish here at the CVS cosmetics counter to waste time during your kid's soccer practice. Couldn't squeak in a chapter of Parenting for Dummies?

K.

Anyway, for those of us with completely empty schedules, unhampered by the grueling daily grind of driving, picking out nail polish, and yapping on the telephone about how weird the Olinger kid's creepy aunt who reads all the time is... there's a really cool thing happening today.




Drop Everything and Read Day is today! The idea (which is more completely and articulately explained in the link) is to take time out to read. Schools, libraries, and bookstores around the country will be having events. All you really have to do is show up with a book, park your rear, and read.

One of the many reasons I mourned the final chapter of the Harry Potter saga was the death of a tradition a little like this. With the release of every new book I made special plans with all the kids and adults who were Potter-obsessed. We'd do the all-night squats at the book store. We'd clutch our brand new copies close, then we'd curl up somewhere together and read it aloud, or have multiple-marathon-reads. By mid-morning everyone was accusing everyone else of cheating to race to the end. But we'd read our Potter installments and bonded. And visions of quidditch still danced in our heads.

That's why I don't understand someone who doesn't like books. To me, it's like refusing free vacations. You don't like books? You don't want to be transported to another place, meet fascinating new people, have adventures, fall in love, learn new things without really trying?

For serious?

I doubt you'd be here, at the Fictionistas' Blog, if you were one of those people.

So join me, for at least a half hour, in dropping everything to read today. Maybe we'll bump into one another at Hogwarts... or at Barton Park, where I hear the Dashwood girls are entertaining Colonel Brandon for tea... or in Fagin's grungy hidey hole, where Dodger is emptying his pockets with booty from pockets he's emptied... or... anywhere, really.