What You Reading For ....

So do I fancy myself as a bit of a writer? No. I fancy myself as a bit of a reader. I can read the fuck out of a book. In fact I’ve read the shit out of loads of books. I’ve read loads of books and got loads of shit out of them. Some were good and some were not so good, some were memorable and others were instantly forgettable. I’ve read books I understood and books I wasn’t sure if I understood. I’ve read books I thought I understood but on reflection probably didn’t. But I read them all anyway. Sometimes you read a book and you think you get what the author is saying. You think you understand. Sometimes you think perhaps there’s a hidden meaning like a parable or perhaps you feel you understand what the author is trying to say, more by what is not being said, rather than what is being said. Then maybe there’s no hidden meaning at all. Maybe you’re looking for something that just isn’t there. Some books are great because you follow the flow, you catch the drift and it’s great from start to finish. You swallow it whole in a few brief sittings. Other times you struggle with the concepts or get lost in the detail but read on anyway because you like the way it’s written. I’ve read fascinating things in books, things that made me stop and think and go wow. But I have forgotten most of them now. But does that really matter? Maybe the author was whacked out of their gord when they wrote it, drunk or on drugs, and maybe they can’t remember it either. They had a thought, an instant or an instance and they thought it worthy of inclusion. Maybe they had that thought and experienced it and said wow and wrote it down and forgot it. Years later I read that thought and experienced it and went wow and forgot it. Maybe we had the same experience with the same thought. We’ll never now for sure for how could we measure it. If the author read that thought again who’s to say they would have the same experience. Have you ever looked at a picture and registered the image in your head. Then looked at it again and saw something that you didn’t notice the first time. It’s the same picture. It hasn’t actually changed. Reading is often like that. So two people, author and reader, may well have an identical experience when first encountering that initial thought. But on subsequent re-experiencing of that same initial thought the experience could be completely different. Like the picture or the text it has changed without actually changing. On revisiting the text it appears to have evolved without actually evolving. The words are the same it is only your interpretation nay understanding of them that may have changed. Books and pictures do not evolve, we do evolve, and they seem to evolve. I see reading as a measurement of my ongoing self evolution and that, is why I read.