Hitting the Books

I'm this close to finishing a book. Reading it, that is.

You don't understand. This is a major accomplishment. I don't read for fun anymore. This will be the first time I've read for fun in well over a year. Sad, isn't it?

I partially blame my reluctance to read on a number of factors--television, the Internet and sleep. Each of these are a better diversion than reading.

But more than any of these, I blame Harvard.

Back in the day, I used to be quite the reader. It was a never-ending cycle of John Grisham novels and baseball books in high school. And I was enjoying the canon from my English class. Before that, in elementary school, I was the proud holder of a bajillion reading awards.

In sixth grade, when we were given a choice of 20 books and were required to read three, I read all 20--even the one that wasn't suitable for our school library to carry.

Years later, I'm at Harvard for my first year, shaking off the rust from a severe case of high school senioritis. I'm thinking I'm ready and rarin' to go on coursework. And then the fit hits the shan--they drop a heap of textbooks and source-books and required materials and suggested reading on me. Of course, the suggested reading is immediately thrown out the window.

So then I'm swimming in theory and evidence and Supreme Court cases and all sorts of dry, dense academic materials. Pretty soon, I've lost all desire to read anything more than a newspaper (which, thankfully, I still enjoy reading).

By this time, whenever I don't have work to do, the most I want to read is the credits on a movie or the latest on cnnsi.com. My attitude toward reading at school hasn't changed since then.

That's really a shame. I had such a history with books, and then it looks like the future for them and me is a question mark.

But this summer I'm trying to recapture the magic. Much like an alcoholic trying to go dry, its a tough climb. The siren's song of the television still calls--sometimes I ignore it, sometimes I don't.

So the book I'm reading now is Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," a first-hand account of Major League Baseball in the late 1960s. It was required reading for History 1653, "Baseball and American Society." It was actually a book I enjoyed reading for class, but I just didn't get the chance to finish it because the books kept coming, even though I wasn't ready for them.

It's taken me a long time to read this book. It's 450 pages and I'm now on about 370. It came in small bites here and there at the beginning, but as I've gotten closer to the end, I've been taking it in bigger chunks. It will be so satisfying when I finish in the next week--a taste of former glory.

And then, when I finish, I'll immediately pick up another book. Maybe this time it will be a novel. Or will it be a biography? Perhaps a play? I'm not sure, but I hope to finish it before school starts again.

William P. Bohlen '01, a government concentrator in Pforzheimer House, is spending his summer writing for the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune.