RUINED BY READING?

My remark yesterday about the sense of duty I often have towards finishing books compelled me to search my shelves for this book: Ruined by Reading, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  Schwartz is herself a novelist, her books are difficult complicated novels with a philosphical bent.  I have read three, don't know if there are more, but it occurs to me that I should check.  This little book is a memoir in reading, and I highly recommend it to other readers.  What I want to do here is share these paragraphs from the book's beginning with you:

     "...a recent New York Times piece quoted a Chinese scholar whole "belief in Buddhism...has curbed his appetite for books.'  Mr. Cha says 'To read more is a handicap.  It is better to keep your own mind free and to not let the thinking of others interfere with your own free thinking.'  I clipped his statement and placed it on the bedside table,next to a pile of books I was reading or planned to read or thought I ought to read.  The clipping is about two square inches and almost weightless, the pile of books some nine inches high, weighing a few pounds. Yet they face each other in perfect balance.  I am the scale on which they rest.
     Lying in the shadow of the books, I brook on my reading habit.  What is it all about?  What am I doing it for?  And the classic addict's question, What is it doing for me?  Mr. Cha's serenity and independence of mind are enviable.  I would like to be equally independent, but I'm not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on it is properly termed 'interference.'  I suspect the interaction of the mind and the book is something more complex.  I can see it encompassing an intimate history and geography:  the evolution of character, the shifting map of personal taste.  And what about the uses of language itself, as well as the perennial lure of narrative?  But perhaps casting the issue in such large terms only shows how enslaved I am.  Buddhism aside, there is no Readers Anonymous, so far, to help curb this appetite.
     ...My addiction is to works of the imagination, and even if I became a Buddhist, I think I couldn't renounce them cold turkey.  Not after a lifetime, the better part of which was spent reading.  Was it actually the better part, though?  Did I choose or was I chosen, shepherded into it like those children caught out early on with a talent for the violin or ballet, baseball of gymnastics, and thethered forever to bows and barres, bats and mats?  We didn't know any alternatives; there was no chance to find them out.  
     ....What do I have, then, after years of indulgence?  A feel, a texture, an aura, the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides.  Are they worth the investment of a life?  Would my mind be more free without them?
      In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom.  Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books.  With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave:  ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. ...I had put aside books before, naturally, but with guilt, sneaking them back to the shelves in the dark.  It seemed a rudeness of the worst sort. A voice was attempting to speak to me and I refused to listen.  A spiritual rudeness. Since childhood I had thought of reading as holy, and like all sacraments, it had acquired a stiff halo of duty. My cavalier throwing over a book midway may arise from the same general desacralization as does the notable increase in divorce, marriage also being a sacrament and, once entered upon, a duty.
     So, like recidivist martyrs, I take up the new book in good faith, planning to accompany it, for better or for worse, till the last page us do part, but...it stops being fun."

Well, there you are. Clearly I could go on til I had typed in the whole book for you, but I won't.  Don't you like her?  I may from time to time drop in some of her thoughts from this delightful little book, especially when my own thoughts are running dry, as at the moment they seem to be.  I've just been on a library foraging trip, did get Plainsong, and will start it tonight.  One of my book journal friends has recommended Orson Scott Card as an author I would like, but I can't find the two books with which she suggests I begin my reading.  I'll have to put in a request, after I read what I gleaned today.