On Books and procrastination...

I like books. A lot. Actually, I love books. I also love reading. I can read anything and enjoy it, including the dictionary and the information in the phone book. I read online. I read ebooks. I read magazines and newspapers and cereal boxes. I do a lot of different types of reading. I read for personal growth. I read for pleasure. I read for information. I read for education. I read for the enjoyment of losing myself in the written word. There are so many ways to do all of that reading, and the most convenient, the cheapest, and the easiest to access is on the Internet. I go to school on the Internet. I gather information for the kid’s schooling on the Internet. I can even read the newspaper, magazine articles, and books on the Internet. I love the ability to find my information quickly.

But there is just something about a book. The feel of the pages, the new book smell, the weight of it in my hands. I surround myself with literature on a variety of topics. When I research something in-depth, I love to surround myself with the books I need to reference. I could lose myself in a library. Not only are the characters in those stories good friends, the actual books themselves are as well. I can find the story, the idea, the thoughts I am looking for with a few flips of the pages.

Going to school online has many perks, but the biggest draw back is that my text books are online as well. Most I download a chapter at a time. I can not feel the pages, flip to information, highlight text, or experience that new book smell. I can only access them while I attend my college because they are password protected. And I can not find the information I need because I scroll through page after page without even knowing I turned the page. And of course there are some books I am glad to not have laying around the house after the class is over. I would probably toss my algebra text book out the window in a fit of joy if I had one. (One being a text book, not a fit of joy, which I did have at the end of Algebra.)

The pages of my favorite books are wearing thin. Without highlighting one can see my favorite portions of text from wear. This is true of my Bible, Lucado and Swindoll books, and also Dekker, Gansky, Peretti and many others. And so I am having a hard time in my classes online because I am having a hard time losing myself in the reading. Instead of researching the reasons behind the founding fathers establishment of a government with three branches and the impact of those three branches on the government of today I am writing a blog. Not even a good or interesting blog, but it is killing time. And now, back to my even more boring government paper…