Mind Sprocket: The Back Page : The Academic Rut

I finished reading “Toilers of the Sea” by Victor Hugo this past weekend. I started reading it the day after Christmas.

Sadly, I no longer consider myself an avid reader, having left such luxuries in the past along with home cooked meals from my mom and study hall periods in high school. And so instead of wiping out a good book in a few days, I drag it out over a few months … something I couldn’t imagine doing a few years ago.

After graduating from college, I entertained ambitious thoughts of reading mountains of books: books that weren’t textbooks or required reading, but books that had descriptors like “fiction” or “bestseller” or “1,000,000 copies sold” attached to them. It was going to be great because those books are the ones that don’t take a lot of time to read. They aren’t dense or difficult to understand or boring.

And yet this is a perfect example of how I found myself gravitating towards something familiar to me, though certainly not easy or popular reading. Ah, literature. Books that only someone like a high school English teacher can love.

Well, I just find it interesting that I can’t seem to get out of the academic rut.

P.S. If you are into vivid description, storms and destruction, shipwrecks, a love story that doesn’t devour the entire plot, a hero, an evil villain, and a giant sea monster, you’ll find it all in “Toilers of the Sea”.