Speed Racer

One night this week Bob and I were talking about the new Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and the fact that it's going to come out the day he leaves on a fishing trip. So I'll probably end up seeing it by myself that week, which is fine. I can't remember the last movie I saw by myself in a theater . . . must have been The Phantom Menace, which I think I saw about three times by myself. But that's another story . . .

I've been listening to the whole Harry Potter series on audio books, one right after the other, so I've been totally immersed in the Harry Potter world. I'm not sure what I'll do when I finish--I just started the fifth one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix yesterday. But I won't have to figure that out for quite a while--it's a HUGE book.

Which is the whole point of this anecdote. Bob said, "I don't think I ever read the last one, do we have it?" Well, of course we do! I read it last year when we were on vacation. Kind of a heavy book to cart along with me, but it was a wonderful vacation book, and I took all week to read it.

We went upstairs to the office, and I searched around on the bookshelves, and in piles of books, and couldn't find it where I thought I had seen it last. Bob finally found it on a bookshelf behind another book, and he sat down to read it. This was probably about 9:00 p.m.

I went back downstairs, then came up a couple of hours later to go to bed, and he was still reading.

Then I woke up at 2:00 a.m., and he wasn't in bed. I got up, went to the bathroom, then went looking for him. He was still sitting in his chair, reading, and it looked like he had about twenty pages to go until the end of the book. I asked him, "Are you almost finished with that book??!" and he said he was. He told me to go back to bed, that he'd be in in about twenty minutes.

I don't have the book in front of me, and don't know how many pages it has, but it's got to be something like 900. Like I said, it took me a week. I wasn't reading it non-stop, of course, but I got some good, long sessions in. Bob read it in about five hours.

And he retains the information, too, unlike me. I read totally for pleasure, for entertainment, and honestly, don't pay a lot of attention. Which is why it's so weird that I almost never re-read anything. Why, in fact, I have a complete aversion to re-reading, except for a very few books. The Harry Potter series is one that I do, and have, re-read. Anne Tyler's books, especially Ladder of Years, my favorite book in the world. And Tyler's Back When We Were Grown-Ups. Several of hers, in fact.

I'll re-read Neil Gaiman's American Gods at some point, and I've been thinking of re-reading Timeline by Michael Crichton; in fact, a lot of Crichton's lend themselves to re-reading--it's probably time to read Jurassic Park again.

But for the most part, I'll never re-read a book, even if I don't remember whether I've read it or not. I keep a list of all the books I've read, and if I can't remember whether I've read one--usually a book in a series--I'll check my list, and if I've read it, I won't read it again. Weird, I know. It's like it's a complete waste of time to read something that I've already read once, even if I have no memory of it.

I've been reading the Online Tarot Course this week, and I looked at books again, this time at Barnes & Noble. I must have looked through a dozen books, and none of them really appealed to me. Some of them were really beautiful as far as the illustrations and cards and color, but seemed kind of scarce on actually description and information. Some of them were dense with information, but had ugly pictures and were printed cheaply. I figured the book had to really "speak" to me in order for me to buy it, otherwise I'd just get something from the library. I didn't want to buy something in haste that would prove to be unusable for me.

Then I looked down at the bottom shelf, and there were a couple of books down there that I hadn't looked at, and one of them was Learning the Tarot, by Joan Bunning--the very book based on the tarot website I've been reading, so I bought it.

I really like the way she writes, and while buying the book might have been unnecessary, since most of the content is on the website anyway, I think I absorb it better reading it from an actual book rather than on the screen. I'm very pleased with it. I think it's an excellent book for someone, like me, just starting out in Tarot.

I'm getting quite excited about it, and I'm trying to contain myself from starting a tarot blog. I may not be able to, though. For now, I think I'll write at Fallen Angel, that seems to be the most appropriate place for it.