There are plenty of books on the shelve. Sometimes I feel like counting them more than I feel like reading them. I have just over a thousand. I've read a few of them.
More and more I don't reach the end of them. Sitting on the bus in the morning I'd rather looking at the same trees, the same byroads, rather than unzip the latest from my bag. Each and everyone seems like a runt of the litter. It's rare for one to make it past a hundred pages for me.
I'm writing this because the latest is about to be put back on the shelf unfinished. Sorry Mr McCarthy, I loved your book about the man and his son, but this one about the three guys in Mexico on their horses, I can't any longer.
I don't know if it's because it's easier to watch American Idol and Lost than it is to read a book. I don't what's happened to me.
I remember a week when I read ten books. It was a week off and I pulled them off the shelf, sat in an armchair by the window and piled through them. I finished every single one without the hint it could ever feel like a chore.
But, now I pick up a book like it's a spade and I have to go grave digging. It's onerous and mechanical. I read half a dozen pages and realise I've taken nothing in - I've been missing the same old trees while the typed text passes by.
I need to fix it. I want to read again, but don't know where to look. And, this is what I think about when I think Murakami running.
I think about it a lot.
