Self-Control & Reading!

It amazes me that some folks have the self control to read a few pages of a good book, then lay it aside to wash dishes, water the roses or even go to bed for a whole night’s sleep.

There must be a special place in heaven reserved for folks with that kind of control…right up there beside mothers of more than one son or two daughters. They probably even get special crowns and get to sleep late on extra fluffy white clouds.

From the time I open the front cover of a book to scan the fly sheet…be it a number one New York Times best seller or poorly written trash…until I’ve sighed over the last words I’m as addicted to that book as Poppa was to Garrett snuff and Old Log Cabin whiskey.

I’m still not sure that Poppa didn’t meet Mama in the first level of eternity with a scowl on his face because she didn’t tuck that little metal can full of snuff in his front overall pocket before they buried him.

That’s every bit how addicted I am to reading. I do mean total and absolute addiction. Not to the point where I carry the book around with me while I vaccum, dust or talk on the phone. Forget that nonsense. I unplug the phones, turn off the cell phones, ignore the dust, forget what a vacuum cleaner is and curl up in my favorite recliner to read.

It’s the only time the grandkids can paint he walls orange and red with markers and do a mural of Old McDonald’s farm in ketchup and mustard on the ceiling. Just don’t interrupt me while I’m trying to get Skink out of trouble out there in the swamp land.

The house goes to the pits. By the time the last page is finished, the last giggle has ended and the last tear dried, the house looks like someone invited a few folks over for a party…like about fifty and they stayed a week.

By then I feel as guilty as warmed over sin on Sunday morning and I swear I’ll never read a whole trilogy at one sitting again. My eyes feel like 80 grit sandpaper and there’s a migraine trying to set up an abode in the back of my head.

This spring has been a mad house so I haven’t had time to indulge in binge reading.

Like a food-o-holic who has a chocolate cake in the house and not even tasted the icing with a thumb nail, I got it in my mind that I had conquered the terrible “reading illness.”

There are hundreds of hard bound books on the bookcase and dozens of paperbacks waiting to be read in my TBR pile. And I had that self control issue cured so I could take a couple of hours and start a book one evening about two hours before bed time.

But how did one ever stop at the end of chapter four. Good lord! I couldn’t leave the heroine in that state of mind. Just one more chapter and I would put the book down. I was in control. I hadn’t even unplugged the phones.

Then it was midnight and the heroine was locked in a dungeon with snakes and spiders and the alpha heroes were still an hour away. It was raining and the thunder was so loud that she could hardly hear the pounding of her heart.

I promised myself I would put the book down at one o’clock. After all I had a deadline to meet the next day with my own writing. But then the alpha heroes arrived and I had to read on to find out which one she was going to fall for.

The sun was coming up over the horizon when I finished the last page. So much for self control!