If you seat a child who has recently returned from fat camp at the dining room table and fill it with cupcakes, bags of chips, and those bagged pastries you can buy at the gas station, his poor, deprived little mouth is going to suck them down faster than the speed of light. It doesn't matter that he spent his entire summer running six miles per week or learning various forms of self-control when it comes to over-indulgence. If you push him just far enough, all of the controlling he learned to do with his mind will sink swiftly into his stomach. And he'll feel bad afterwards. But during? While he's swimming in a sea of the snacks he's fantasized about for four months? He'll feel oh. So. Good.
Gluttony comes in many forms. Obviously food, sex, drugs, and the like are most addressed by society because they're the most popular outlets. But there are a few secret, underground gluttons who prefer to remain less apparent. They skulk around the vast, dusty shelves of libraries, digging for spare change in gutters so they can pay their overdue fines. They avoid bookstores because most of their debts can be traced back to an overly enthusiastic trip to Borders. The bookworms. The readers. Those whose relatives buy them the latest bestseller for Christmas without even asking first. They may not be outwardly harming themselves with their gluttony, but trust me. The bookworm is just as dangerous a glutton as any. And most of them were born this way - there's nothing they can do about it.
As one of the aforementioned cursed-at-birth bookworms, I experience the side-effects of my gluttony much the same way the kid with the smorgasbord of snacks would. When I find a book that captures my imagination to the degree that part of my mind is thinking about the characters and their desires while the book is closed and on my bookshelf, I have no choice but to give it my utmost attention. I cancel plans. I close the door to my room and don't bother talking to anyone. I neglect the cleanliness of my carpet, my laundry, my e-mail, any form of regular eating schedule - the only place I go is to class, and even then I bring the book along because it makes me feel better. If I get too bored or stressed while I'm there, the characters will be right there next to me. It's like having a friend in my backpack. And it feels oh. So. Good.
On the other hand, similar to the fat kid, I suck that story down at the speed of light. After about 24 to 36 hours of the inexplicably wonderful comfort of being curled up on my comforter with a book that practically stabs me with its demand to be read, it is gone. The last page flutters closed along a few more filler pages in the back of the binding, and then the back cover slips between my fingers and the book closes itself to me. And I can't get back in, because it's not the same anymore. If I open it back up right away, the characters will be too tired to tell me their story quite as well. I have to let them rest.
The next phase is what I like to call the aftermath. It's when I spend the next 2 to 3 days sulking, inwardly pissed that I finished the book so quickly, but not having an adequate way to outwardly express this bizarrely fantastic frustration. I want to slip back into the book's world - I want to feel what the book feels, I want to teleport and cast spells and fall in love and watch people die. But I can't get back in, no matter how hard I try. Sometimes I even open another book, hoping it will sweep me away on some new adventure so I can get over the old one. But the new book is just a rebound. It just makes me miss the old one all the more, and I usually throw it aside and glare at it for trying to replace something so epic.
This is the trigger to my current aftermath, and even Harry Potter couldn't heal my separation anxiety. I might write a review soon, but for the time being I just want to bask in how good I felt while I was reading it. As a writing major, I get sucked up in the battle between literary fiction and the sort of fiction that normal people who aren't hipsters or college kids or angsty white writer men read. This one reminded me why reading is important, and why I don't care about securing a space in the VIP literary fiction lounge. It also reminded me why I write.
Read slowly, friends.
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