I have long since stopped believing that just by buying a book, I could - without the requisite effort - absorb its contents and become enlightened by it.Well...I never really believed that, but you would have thought that I did, given the ridiculous acquisition of books during the dying days of my PhD. Books represented
knowledge (a good thing), therefore buying (= owning) books, means buying knowledge. Only it didn't. It just meant I had a large pile of unread books, which made me more and more uneasy, mocking me, deriding my inability to open the cover and do anything about it. Intellectual inertia. And the eventual end of the PhD, a huge pile-up of anxiety and a derailing of goals and good intentions.
Then the calm after the storm. The cleansing of guilt, the eventual ability to get hold of a book without any unrealistic expectations about what it could do for me. A book as a good thing, something to enjoy, to relax with, rather than a mute reproach.
Only just getting back on track some 18 months later, getting my reading mojo back, looking for things I will enjoy reading, that will transport me to a different world, at least temporarily.
