Do you remem­ber using the card cat­a­log? I sure do. My fond­est mem­o­ries of the card cat­a­log was when I was in ele­men­tary school, and my sis­ter and I would go to the Kala­ma­zoo Pub­lic Library every other week­end. We would search for inter­est­ing stuff, and walk out of the library with books stacked up to our chin. I don’t remem­ber what I checked out way back then, but it was fun to come home with a huge stack of books. Well, I took a step toward reliv­ing some of that excite­ment yes­ter­day. I stopped at the local branch of the DC Pub­lic Library and got a library card.

I know that pick­ing up a library card may seem rather triv­ial, espe­cially in this day of e-books, iPads, Kin­dles, Nooks and other e-readers. How­ever, pick­ing up a library card was sim­ply a nos­tal­gic nod to my child­hood, or the start of some move­ment against tech­nol­ogy. No. It’s much deeper than that for me.

I can­not pin­point the exact time in my life when my read­ing rou­tine changed and declined. I don’t know if the aca­d­e­mic “rigor” of mid­dle– and high school was the cul­prit, but I def­i­nitely read much less on my own — for plea­sure — as I got older. It seemed that most of the things that I read were for school. Out­side of school­work, I would mainly read car and skate­board mag­a­zines, album cov­ers (don’t ask), and occa­sion­ally thumb through shelves lined with Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­nica and National Geo­graphic mag­a­zines. (What can I say? I’ve been a nerd for a long time.) I was an Eng­lish major in col­lege, and cer­tainly read a lot. Though much of the mate­r­ial that I read in col­lege lit­er­a­ture classes was inter­est­ing and enjoy­able, that read­ing, again, was not for plea­sure. It took effort to read all of those books. The only thing that saved me through­out my years in school, includ­ing law school, is that I typ­i­cally retain what I read.

But what hap­pened to read­ing for plea­sure? How do I get that back?

The answer to that ques­tion has been rather hard to pin down. If you pay atten­tion to my book­marks series, you prob­a­bly are think­ing, “It sure seems like you read a lot;” but that read­ing is spread out over the course of a week, and it comes in doses. No longer do I curl up in a chair with a book like I did when I was a kid — escap­ing into the story.

I have yet to read Nicholas Carr’s The Shal­lows: What the Inter­net Is Doing to Our Brains, which is sit­ting on my cof­fee table, but I am very inter­ested to look deeper into about what Carr has to say about how our brains are being rewired because of the Inter­net. I touched on this a bit in my piece about opt­ing out of social media, but I feel like my thoughts and focus are shot. I look with envy when I see some­one lost in a book. Carla is a vora­cious reader. I want some of that.

I think the first step toward my goal of read­ing more is to fig­ure out what I am really inter­ested in. I never real­ized how much I wanted to impress oth­ers with smarts. I would, some­times, read obscure works just that I could sound, if not be, learned. My inter­est was not con­nected to what was revealed between the cov­ers of the book, but by the reac­tions of those who heard me recite the words from these books. That’s bad.

[Start: “dirty laun­dry”]

Some­time this prac­tice applied to things that inter­ested me, too. I’ve done a lot of read­ing and think­ing about the plight of Blacks in this coun­try, as well as Blacks in the dias­pora. How­ever, there are times when I would just feel “Blacked Out.” I got sick of always, and fairly exclu­sively, read­ing about Black peo­ple. For the record, it’s not as easy as just say­ing “Well, just read some­thing else.” At least it wasn’t that easy for me, because I have always felt a respon­si­bil­ity for being knowl­edge­able about the his­tory, and cur­rent con­di­tion, of Black peo­ple. That prob­a­bly needs to be worked out in another post, and I need to move on. I’ll just say this: That shit is exhausting! Fortunately, I have moved to a place where I am focused on being authen­tic and not liv­ing to prove or jus­tify myself, or impress others.

[End “dirty laun­dry”]

So, what do I want to read? I have always said that I don’t enjoy fic­tion, which is a bit because I love fic­ti­tious movies. Nev­er­the­less, I’ve tried and failed to get into most fic­tion books. It could have some­thing to do with my lack of patience and focus. I prob­a­bly haven’t given most books time to warm up and grab my atten­tion. I’ve had a bad habit of approach­ing books with a microwave atten­tion span. Come on! It’s been 30 sec­onds already. Why aren’t you hot yet?

Recently, I picked up Shelly Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Tech­nol­ogy and Less From Each Other, about the ironic phe­nom­e­non of the dis­con­nec­tion in the age of online social net­works and tech­no­log­i­cal tools like email, text mes­sag­ing and instant mes­sag­ing. The book has pulled me in, and I admit that I have been quite proud about plow­ing through the book. I feel inspired. I’ve started to think about what I want to read next. The dif­fer­ence is that I feel the urge to fol­low through, whereas before I would just buy a new book that would even­tu­ally just col­lect dust on the shelf, cof­fee table or night stand. I was so tick­led with myself in the library that I must have walked around for about 30 min­utes before I started to hone in on some books that I have been eye­balling lately. Most of them have to do with cre­ativ­ity, focus, and learn­ing more about how our minds work. Just as I was about to pick up The Ele­ment: How Find­ing Your Pas­sion Changes Every­thing by Ken Robi­son, I saw Moon­walk­ing with Ein­stein: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing and it spoke to me. I took the book the counter with a big smile on my face. The librar­ian was still enter­ing my infor­ma­tion into the com­puter. She scanned the book and pulled out the date stamp to mark my due date. I felt myself shrink to a lit­tle kid look­ing up to the counter, reach­ing out to take my book home. Some­times we can — and should — relive our childhood.

I just pre-ordered a Nexus 7 tablet, so I am already won­der­ing if I will move to read­ing only e-books. I think that the con­ve­nience of an e-reader will be nice, but I think that I’d like to not lose that sen­sa­tion of hold­ing a book in my hands; not to men­tion the child-like thrill of going to the library.

Do you have a library card? If so, do you actively use it?