Thoughts
In kindergarten we had a bookshelf of bins of books. And the bins were labeled A-Z and the books classified into a bin based on how
difficult they were to read. So A was just a couple words on the page, Dr. Seuss might have been around an M or an N, and then at the end there was a big bin with the last letters of the alphabet. I don’t remember any of the exact letters, but this last bin might have been W-Z. And it contained all of the books that weren’t picture books: the novels. (Okay we were in kindergarten, novella would probably be more accurate, but whatever.)
Now I was a very good reader as a kindergartner. Some of my classmates were in the A-D range all through kindergarten, but I read almost all of the Q, R, S, T books. But I was scared of that last bin that had novels.
Now, the pictures (or lack thereof) had nothing to do with it. By the time you’re reading U books there are way more words than pictures anyways. What scared me was the length. When you’re reading a picture book, it’s quick to read it from start to finish, no big deal, a couple of minutes. But my fear with the novels was that I wasn’t going to finish it, and I was going to have to come back to it later.
This fear isn’t rational, strictly speaking. But at the same time, it is very scary. To venture into a book knowing that you might get interrupted, and then you might get lost. You might lose your place, you might forget what happened at the beginning, you might get stuck and be unable to make it to the end. This does happen to me now, I have to force myself to finish books that I don’t want to, and there are books that I never finished that haunt me. I’m scared of losing my place in a book.
I eventually read all the interesting picture books and had to start on the novellas, and it was fine. I was reading Harry Potter by third grade.
But this story should tell you a lot about me. I’m still terrified of commitment and of not finishing things and of losing my place in the world. I got over the initial hump with reading; I let go of the edge of the pool; I’ve made computer programs that have taken so long that I’ve lost motivation in the middle and given up. But there are other areas where I’ve never really committed to it. I’ve never sat down to try to draw something that’s going to take more than 30 minutes. I’ve never asked a girl out. I’ve never written something longer than 4,000 words. Maybe someday I’ll have the courage to reach into that Q-Z bin in these areas.