You can make book on this

I really and truly love to read. Sometimes, when I'm weary, I long for the end of the day so that I can curl up in bed with a book. Reading is the third best thing one can do in bed. Sleeping being another one of the three.

I'm an inveterate and voracious reader. In fact, I'm a reading slut. If there is nothing good to read, then I will read whatever is available. Awful to me is to heed a call of nature and to be positioned on the john with no reading material. At such a time I will read a shampoo bottle or tampon label. You can actually learn a lot that way.

Lately though I've been bothered a bit by my literary slumming. I was an English major in university, and subsequent to my own studies, I also taught high school English for a number of years. In those years I read assorted literary works, and managed to wade through even Moby Dick (I have no desire to ever repeat that experience). I liked good literature and fine fiction. I've done Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Graves, George Orwell (every damn word the man ever wrote in his truncated life), Huxley, and so on and so on.

But, for some reason, somewhere in middle age, I seem to have kissed fiction goodbye. There was something that began to irk me about fiction. I think it was the fact that it's not real. So, I started to read non-fiction voraciously -- especially biography and diaries. I've continued with that mode and, in being a bit of a memoirist myself, I have an admiring resentment of writers like Augusten Burrows (Running with Scissors, Dry) and Rick Bragg (Ava's Man) because they are so damn good at their craft. I'd likewise envy old and far too charming codger Frank McCourt because he is such a storyteller. I don't even care if not every scrap of Angela's Ashes is the utter truth, exactly as it happened, I'd just like to sit in a Killarney pub with a pint of Guinness and listen to the man spin his tales.

Lately my reading has taken me to true crime stuff, and especially Ann Rule's sagas of the most despicable excuses for humanity you would ever want to meet -- Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, etc. etc. -- and marvel at both the energies of a woman her age turning out the number of books she does, and also her amazing skill at her craft. A skill that leaves her so readable that I am sucker-punched when she publishes yet another tome that I will feel compelled to buy.

But, you see, here is my quandary. I have literary guilt. As an erstwhile English student and teacher, I feel guilty. I feel that I have allowed my horizons to limit themselves when I realize that I read the Globe and Mail books section each weekend and my eyes simply pass over the fiction categories so I can get to the reviews of 'real' stories.

Oh well, if literary slut I must be, then at least the literary part has some validity in a post-literate age.