When there are hundreds of things waiting to be done, when your to-do list is throbbing like the telltale heart, but, instead of doing anything required, you hide in a quiet corner or stand up next to the task you should be doing and read purely for pleasure: this is a sneak read.
This is not the leisurely weekend morning casual read. There are complex feelings involved in sneak reading:
AUDACITY: you’ve decided that you’re doing this–it’s happening–despite what you should be doing frowning at you from the back corner of your brain.
ADRENALINE: you’re reading faster than usual, your finger hovering, ready to turn the page quickly, and you’re listening for the sound of tires on the gravel, approaching footsteps, a hand on the doorknob.
GUILT: you feel it when someone unexpectedly pops in–your partner, your parent, or your boss–and you quickly switch over to the task you should have been doing…shoving the book away like you don’t even care about it.
A sneak read bender is when you’ve cranked through a couple of books in the past couple days, and now you can’t stop reading…and it feels great…naughty even. And you decide that most of those items on the to-do list were optional anyway.
As we slip into chilly days and early nights (or in the case of Miami, dark days from endless rain), feel free to comment on your favorite books–the ones you’ve read over and over again or the series that you read one after the other without coming up for air. Looking back, I can’t remember most of the things I checked off my to-do lists, but the books I’ve read stay with me forever.
theweeklyobserver 