Cover to cover

I used to be a reader, a dorky kid who tried to calculate how to get the most cheap paperbacks from the classroom book order, an adult whose fondest furniture wish was always for built-in bookcases. I'd still take the bookcases, and the room that would hold them, but these days they wouldn't fill up nearly as fast, unless I piled my issues of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated on the shelves before they hit the recycle. The number of books I've finished this year is shamefully slim. I blame the Internets.

Because I read, all the time, websites, and blogs, and online versions of out-of-town papers, but something with a dust jacket and a binding and pages? Not so much, anymore, or at least not lately. But I did it last night, and again today, sat down and read a book from start to finish, the way I once did all the time. And was it worth it? Well no, not in the sense that the book was all that good, because it wasn't. But it wasn't a waste of my time, either.

What did I read? The latest Harry Potter, the media machine disguised as a kid's book that arrived at our house Saturday both because my daughter had to have it and because I wanted to read it before being spoiled by all the non-book reading that I do. The other Harry Potters are the first books of mine that my daughter took off my shelf and read, but this wasn't some big mother-daughter moment. If the books meant something to me, I suppose I could make it into one, and you bet I value the fact that she wants to plop her increasingly big-kid self down on the couch next to me and read, but I think I got the biggest kick out of her wide-eyed, "Wow," when I told her I was finished with the book. Speed-reading won't be impressive for long, especially once she realizes she's as fast as I am, but I'll take whatever wonder at the meager skills of her mother she's got while it lasts.