If you’re going to read this, don’t bother. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television.
What happens here is, first, going to piss you off. After that, it just gets worse and worse.
Don’t you realize what you signed up to do? Four years of endless reading. Don’t trust the newspapers. Don’t stand in line for your textbooks. Don’t go searching in the libraries.
Play boss and shut down the main library. Leave behind generations of ignorant people.
Burn down the old bricks of a bookstore building. Build skyscrapers for cockroaches. And when everything is done, nobody will consider you a winner. Nobody will want to hire you.
Nobody will understand your depth, never knowing what Socrates meant, or finding the romance to Galileo connecting dots. There will be no attraction for abstract Cubist paintings or a culture to build upon after souls like the restless Rimbaud.
There will be no sappy self-help books. Not even an irrational Chuck Palahniuk character will exist to mimic. But too much of this kind of thinking and all that will remain are rotten brains.
Reading will happen in college — and lots of it. Just as my psychology professor convinced us on our first day in his class, this process will be a lot like how one cannot drink an entire gallon of water in one day, but how over a sensible period of time, it is possible.
Some days you’ll labor like a rookie on a 5,000-meter heat running with two sore ankles — reading 20, 30, maybe 50 or 100 pages from one night to the next. Other days you’ll bathe in a victorious sweep, moving fluidly and elegantly through chapters and book, like the svelte gymnast Nastia Liukin.
You will stand taller and have a lighter mind, even though inside you’ll feel tingles from your fingertips all the way down to your coccyx. New worlds not to be confined to physical dimensions will unfold. Suddenly the world will be like one grand Pucci parade of minds and disciplines.
This market is tireless. The reading business for college students is like a saturated market with spillover benefits.
You can be sensuous with the activity, holding it akin to certain pleasurable activities you’d find in a Diane Ackerman novel, or employ mastered techniques like a worshiping Kamasutram character. If you consider the latter ideal most appealing, then you’ll need to clear a restful bed right for profound, nourishing sleep.
I’ve learned to keep it simple.
Learning skills specialist Pat Mulleavy at the Cal State Long Beach Learning Assistance Center says that watching out for the “5 W’s and H” — who, what, when, where, why and how — and shortening the time for reading passages are the key techniques used for analyzing and absorbing everything you ever read.
You may find you have extraordinary talents for reading — you’re a speed-reader, like Theodore Roosevelt was, or you like to request the library to set aside for you every new book that ever comes through, like Thomas Edison did. You may love the smell and look of books, desiring a full library for your personal collection.
Whatever happens, reading is very essential for success.
Barbara Navarro is a senior Journalism major and a contributing writer for the Daily Forty-Niner.