Look At Me Read

Today is Opposite Day. Obviously, this is a fictitious holiday but anything that was done in a Calvin and Hobbes comic must be of great importance.




I have been making up time this week by coming in a little early so that I can leave work early on Friday. The School Girl has another chiropractic appointment that day but I have to leave early from work to get her there before it closes at 6:00 PM. I realized that as of this morning’s commute I already had an hour made up which is more than I needed. I decided that I might hang out at the nearby Target or find a bookstore when I heard something piqued my interest.

Tom Griswold of The Bob & Tom Show was talking about bookstores and about the anality (is that a real word?) of people who shop there. A light bulb went off for me. I like to make the occasional shopping run to Wally-World or music stores but I never feel the need to be quiet. When I go into bookstores; however, people are ALWAYS speaking in hushed tones because others may be reading. I don’t tip-toe around people in the book section at Wal-Mart. I’m not whispering to my wife at the Dollar General. I don’t use hand signals when at the Kroger picking up more Fig Newtons (man, I love those things).



Etiquette says that we should be respectful of those people who are reading, like for example, in a library. What makes these shoppers (and I am one of them) think that we should have silence in an establishment that hawks hardbacks because you have decided to park your backside down on the floor and read something you have removed from the shelf. The more that I think about it all, aren’t you actually stealing if you are reading a book that you haven’t purchased? I mean, you don’t go into Food Lion and crack open a bag of Baked Lay’s (I love that SNL skit, Jarret’s Room, with Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz when…) to see if I will like them, I just take a chance.

This brings up a bigger issue. Do we as readers feel a sense of superiority over our non-reading brethren? Do we think that since we are buying the latest Tom Clancy or Stephen King novel that we are better than the rest? Of course we do and we demand quiet when we show off our reading skills. This complex must be something that is learned as we get older. Children who have learned to read tend to be very proud of themselves (and they should) as they walk about with their Lemony Snicket or Little Golden Books reading aloud. They enjoy hearing themselves read and letting everyone else hear them, too.



Friday afternoon, if you are in the Brentwood area and you hear a grown man reading out loud from in the history section, come over and say “hello” and we can talk over the light Enya or John Tesh music about how amazingly skilled we are at reading and maybe point and laugh at all of the arrogant and silent people sitting cross-legged on the floor…right where I used to sit.