I did it again last night. I stayed up much later than I should've in order to finish the book I was reading. Last night's book of choice was Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Certain Girls. I had been waiting rather impatiently since April for my turn on the library's hold list and once I had the book in my hot little hands, I had to read it as fast as possible. Well, that tends to be true for just about any book I'm enjoying...
I've been a bookworm since I first began reading as a preschooler. In my childhood, I spent many a night bargaining to be allowed to stay up late enough to read "just one more chapter" and then reading way more than just one. I cannot tell you how many mornings over my lifetime I've been yawning and bleary-eyed because I didn't get enough sleep thanks to a book. Today is no exception - I wound up getting a little over four hours of sleep last night and now I'm drinking soda at 6:30am to try and wake the heck up. (Yeah, I know - soda first thing in the morning? Ew! I don't drink coffee, however, so soda is the caffeinating beverage of choice for me when necessary!) Not to mention the times when the book I was reading was Nancy Drew or, later on, Stephen King and I'd wind up sleeping not only less, but fitfully thanks to nightmares from the book I'd been reading! When I'd borrowed It from a friend who was a huge King fan, it scared me so much that I wouldn't sleep with the book in my room. I'd read and read and read, then when I couldn't stay awake a moment longer, I'd get up, creep to the other side of the house and leave the book in the guest room closest to my parents' bedroom. Somehow that was supposed to keep me safe, ya know...
I still bargain to read "just one more chapter" these days, but now instead of bargaining with my parents, it is with myself, or Hubby if I'm reading in bed after he's gone to sleep. I'll tell myself "okay, just to the end of this next section to find out what happens." Then I'll get there and want to know what happens next, so it's "one more chapter, that's IT!" Then I'll realize that I'm within 100 pages of the end of the book, and that's when I'm sunk - I can read 100 pages in under an hour unless I'm reallllllly tired, so if I see that I'm that close to the end, I will invariably stay up to finish. This was bad enough when it meant yawning my way through a day of school, but now I'm just getting too darn old to handle such late nights with any regularity. You'd think I would've learned by now to just put the book down, you know? I'm hopeless!
So, if you happen to catch me yawning hugely or looking half-dead on any given day, chances are that it is because I was burning the midnight oil with my nose stuck in a book.
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