Confessions of an e-book junkie

I’ve never been a ‘reader’. Reading for pleasure never before occurred to me as something to do. Before this year, specifically January 24^th, you could have asked me what the last book I read had been and I would have answered “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” but with this disclaimer ‘I didn’t personally read it, my wife read it out-loud to me and occasionally when her voice got tired I’d read to her’. There was a brief moment in time as a teenager when I tried to get into Stephen King: I was laid up with a dislocated knee so my aunt gave me a couple of his books, “Cujo” and “Misery”, I made it through Misery although the story and descriptions I could swear made my leg hurt worse! Then, half way through Cujo I was sitting by the window in my room reading it when, at a very intense part of the story when Cujo was attacking the car, our big black Lab decided he needed to jump up on my window and bark at me. After throwing the book across the room and screaming, I laughed hysterically at myself, but I never managed to finish the book; I was fifteen. I’m now thirty-five and I’ve just discovered an affinity for reading. Since 1/24/11 I have read sixty books (some twice but only counted once), yes mathematicians that works out to about eight and half books a month. It helped that I discovered a genre of writing that I thoroughly enjoy, Lesbian romance, erotica, and or suspense. Who knew there were even such things? I first stumbled across the genre while deciding what to spend my Barnes & Noble gift card on. I couldn’t tell you why my parent’s always got me a B&N gift card at Christmas, I’m sure my mother was hoping that I would use it to buy something to read, anything really, a magazine or maybe a cookbook; my parents love my cooking. But, in previous years I always spent the card on stuff like calendars or music, or I held on to it to buy gifts for other people. This year I couldn’t tell you what motivated me to actually want to buy a book, but I approached the purchase as I do anything else, I researched it. I Googled Lesbian romance authors and somehow I landed on the Bella Books website. Bella publishes nothing but lesbian authors and or lesbian stories. In perusing the Bella website I discovered the author Gerri Hill. When I went to the B&N website and saw that they had a couple of Gerri’s books I figured they must have them in store too. But, when I went to my local B&N store looking for these gay fiction novels, I searched for twenty minutes with no luck; finally I had to ask someone where to locate this particular genre. Why in the hell would B&N park gay and lesbian fiction under ‘Cultural Studies’? Anyway, I scooped up three of Gerri Hill’s novels, and I’ve never looked back. I proceeded to purchase the entire Gerri Hill library in paperback form from Bella Books. I started joking with my parents that it sure would be nice if the Easter bunny brought me a Nook for Easter. Low and behold the Easter bunny did bring me a Nook! And so began my e-book addiction. August marked for me a wake-up call after tracking one hundred and twenty dollars worth of e-book purchases I decided that I needed to impose a purchasing freeze on myself. Now I’m not to exceed one hundred dollars which is ten books from B&N.com. One hundred dollars is a lot, but come on, I’m not going to go cold-turkey; I figure I’ll cut back gradually, and maybe force myself to read slower. All I know is I need to do something because maxing out my credit card; which by the way, I had to take off my B&N account and give my debit card info (thinking this would temper my spending) but it only made the dire situation more evident when I realized that I needed to borrow money from my wife so I could make sure all the bills got covered! They say acknowledging you have a problem is the first step to recovery, “hello world, I have a reading problem!”