Bryan Joiner

I’m up to 75 miles since I bought my iPod shoes, but I have not been running much in the last two weeks. I’ve been on a bad sleep schedule and I was tearing through the final two Harry Potter books, which I felt an all-consuming need to finish fairly quickly. Why? The Harry Potter stigma.

Like many New Yorkers, I read my books on the train pretty much every day, and the Harry Potter books are easily recognizable because of their heft and their distinct, colorful covers. One day last week, as I was knee-deep in the sixth book, I sat next to someone reading the seventh installment and across from someone immersed in book one. And there were only seven people on the train. The point being, it’s not easy to hide, and Harry Potter readers are everywhere. But there’s no safety in numbers: carry around a Harry Potter book, and you’ll be subjected to countless tilted heads and disdainful looks. They send messages with their eyes: You, they ask, you’re reading a children’s book? Others, undoubted, are trying to send some encouragement: I know, I’ve been there, but it’s an interesting little dynamic that, at least in my head, sets off the greater debate about the value of popular literature.

I’ve heard friends speak ill of the Harry Potter franchise and the works of Stephen King, and, by contrast, I know an English Ph.D. student who believes the text of the Harry Potter series has theoretical value. I tend to agree with the latter, because I believe one can meaningfully deconstruct almost any text, but it’s not possible to enjoy almost any text; those who believe that Harry Potter books have done a disservice to literature are underestimating the value of storytelling in the service of their own shame, or ego. But I don’t read for other people. I read for myself.

… as I did today, I usually do so at book-loop.blogspot.com. This is mostly in an effort to bring my massive personal readership to the site in the hopes of expanding our readership and forming an identity. Anyone who wants to join is welcome. We’re not sure what we’re doing yet, but we’re trying and we’ll take all the help we can get.

I need a book to read at all times. Or, put another way, I cannot be without a book for a period of longer than two days without becoming erratic and irrational. Maybe I’m overreacting, but time without a book really screws up my schedule. While I’m by no means a “life by routine” guy, I have certain amounts of time reserved each day for certain activities. Forty minutes for taking the train each day, an hour for reading, thirty minutes for thinking about exercising and unlimited night and weekend minutes for eating. When I don’t have a book, the reading hour can drift away, leading me into various permutations of doing nothing. If I could turn it into writing each day, it would not be so bad, I suppose, but that’s hard for me. I like reading AND writing, but not equally. That may be why I find the newspaper business so draining: lots of writing, little reading. Given the choice of doing one forever and the other never again, I would choose reading in a heartbeat. Sorry to disappoint you.

I think this is a problem because I am quite particular about the books I read. I will only read books that have been recommended to me by friends, books that are uniformly well-reviewed upon being issued or classics that have oozed into my brain through some weird sequence of events (A Jeopardy! question, blog post, etc.). When nobody has recommended anything new and there are no new books over which to drool, the classics are usually the fallback option, but sometimes it is hard for me to stick my head 200 or 2,000 years into the past. The book I really want to read is in transit to my library branch at the moment, because I find it hard to pay for books unless there’s a really good reason. Why don’t I just choose something else? Well, sometimes I try. I currently have  a new book, Blink, with which I’m not satisfied.

I read books that are recommended because I value my peers’ opinions but mostly because I’ll then have somebody with whom to talk about the book. Sometimes this does not work because they will have read the book a long time ago and forgotten most of the details by the time I’m finished, which is fine as long as the book is good. I can’t remember the last book that was recommended to me that I didn’t like, so this usually isn’t an issue. But I really like getting to talk about books.

So the short of it is that right now I’m bookless.

Let it also be known that I had half a Starbucks tall coffee at 9 p.m. and my feet are still shaking (It’s 12:35 a.m.). The rest of me is pretty tired, but they’re buzzing like electric toothbrushes. Right now, I’ve settled into the routine of a cup of coffee or iced coffee every morning and one sometime in the afternoon, and the evening one was really just for fun while I watched the NBA Finals.