SpeaksofRivers

My name is SpeaksofRivers--and I am a book addict.

The habit started with the company I kept in my youth. I hung out with all kinds of shady characters and they got me hooked on the stuff. Since then, my life has been a shameless flight from one literary high to another.

I have done all manner of evil things to support my... more »

My name is SpeaksofRivers--and I am a book addict.

The habit started with the company I kept in my youth. I hung out with all kinds of shady characters and they got me hooked on the stuff. Since then, my life has been a shameless flight from one literary high to another.

I have done all manner of evil things to support my habit. I have squandered my lunch money at the School Book Fair, stolen paperbacks from my mother, bummed hits off of teachers, friends and other enablers.

I once punched a cop because he said that mysteries weren't serious literature. I once robbed a used bookstore at pencil point.

I was a monster.

I checked myself into rehab swearing that this time- this time- I would get sober. No more slipping The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my purse . No more hiding Walt Whitman in my Bible to read during church (shameful, I know). I would straighten out my life, lay off the Tolkien and live like normal people without the shame and stigma of being a junkie.

But I was nothing without my fix. My nose ran like crazy. I couldn't stop trembling. They put me on television, radio, film-but no other media would do. I craved Dickens, Dante- anything. With my skin crawling, my mind blank, I busted through a window and went on an epic library binge.

I maxed out three library cards and woke up lying in a sweaty, unmade bed full of hardcovers, bookmarks scattered hither and thither. I felt no shame.

Since then, I have never again tried to reform. This is the drug that liberates. This is the drug that enlightens. There is no high like that which can be found in the whispering, monotone pages of a book.

I have even moved on to ever stronger highs (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, even Langston Hughes. Yes. I have done Hughes). I know that I will end up living behind a Barnes and Noble in a cardboard box, begging for spare change to squander in the library's used book bin...but I love the debauchery of a midnight read... « less