For many, reading time is sacred. You make the decision to pick up a book for an hour, or a few, and live in another world for a while. Your surroundings become a blur and you fade into the book, not really seeing the words on the page anymore but building the scenes in your mind, creating the motion picture (this is why I always strive to read the book before I see the movie because the film takes away my ability to create the world for myself first).
Naturally, it follows that reading is a somewhat solitary activity. I’ve had fantastical notions of “socializing” by spending reading time with a friend—two of us, in the same room, reading together. But what it comes down to is that two people reading together cannot simultaneously socialize without stopping every few sentences or so to comment or what have you. Real reading time consists of silence and solitude. Interruptions disrupt the flow of the narrative; they jarringly press the pause button on the mind-movie.
Now you can bluntly convey to others your wish to read without disruption with a customized “Go Away, I’m Reading” book jacket. Bold and decisive: I would like to be left alone right now. Do not disturb. No, this familiar title is not an invitation to drag me into your own impromptu book club meeting simply because I chose to take my book out in public and you happened to be there.
A bit harsh, but it’s what most of us want, right?
I do know a number of people with a similar pet peeve that they hate when people in the park or on the train crane to see what they are reading. I will confess, I do this all the time—I see the person next to me holding a book and a natural curiosity takes over to find out what the folks are reading these days (fyi for most it’s Tina Fey’s Bossypants). I have heard some people put in the “pros” list about their e-reader that they enjoy the fact that people can’t immediately see what they are reading. Sales of romance e-books have gone up.
Either way, what’s at work here is a desire for some kind of privacy, to exist in our own private bubble, undisturbed. This is by no means anything wrong with this. But a friend of mine did make an interesting comparison. I mentioned to him something I had read by Christine Rosen that examines human behavior in our technological age and how a discrepancy between a wealth of information (to be gained from the internet) and a wealth of experience (to be gained from the physical world) might affect our lives, habits and expectations.
She does not make the somewhat typical argument on this front that technology could be our downfall (an argument you find in books like Virtually You), but she does talk about how we use technology as mediators in our lives, how people walk down the street on their smart phones with their earbuds in and dissociate themselves from the world they are living in. Anyhow, my friend countered with the comment that “well, when the printing press came around, people were probably thinkin’ that those folks were spending too much time reading.”
Books mediate our reality too, sure, that’s true. And when we sit in a public place begging to be left alone with Tina Fey or whatever book, we resist a physical interaction with the world just as much as when we’re texting or what have you.
But it’s better when it’s books, right? Right. Reading is an emotional learning experience. It is not the same as that person who stands there texting because they feel so awkward about being alone in a public place that they need to prove to the world that they indeed have friends who talk to them (it’s okay, I have done it, too, on occasion).
So, yes, go away! I’m reading.
Your New Beau