Learning to Love a Good Book
By Paul Morrone CFP®, CPA, MSA
During high school and college I got turned off to reading. Nearly a decade of book reports, summer reading assignments, essays and projects was about all I could handle. Unfortunately, the deluge of information didn’t end there and after college I quickly fell into a multi-year period of graduate education and professional examinations (CFP®, CPA, securities and insurance licenses), requiring countless hours of force feeding volumes of information into my head at a breakneck pace. After drinking from a fire hose for years, I’m finally beginning to recover from the information hangover.
The amount of text I’m now forced to read and write is back to a palatable amount which has created some extra capacity in my head for mindless reading. With that, I’ve developed a whole new outlook on reading for pleasure and truly enjoy sitting down with a good book. While I’m certainly not a literary by any stretch of the imagination, the likes of John Grisham and James Patterson have kept me company during many plane rides, afternoons on the beach and days by the pool. While I’m not partial to any genre, I enjoy everything from classic literature, to non-fiction to sci-fi.
I’ve found that reading nice distraction for my generally on-the-go personality, not just for me, but more so for Jill. I’ve never been the type to sit in the sun and bake for hours, but I can sit underneath an umbrella with a cocktail and motor through a book with ease. It allows both of us to really wind down and relax, and she can enjoy the fact that I’m not pestering her to do something every two minutes. I started reading again to fight boredom and because of my inability to sleep on an airplane. We were doing a lot of traveling and I realized that I could only watch so much TV without wanting to pull what’s left of my hair out. This is especially true during the day because after The Price is Right is over I really struggle to find something to watch.
Before a flight one day I was strolling around the terminal when I stumbled across the newsstand in Hartford that has the Read and Return policy. It’s essentially a rental library where you have 6 months to return a book for 50% of the purchase price. The best part is, you don’t have to return the book to the store at which you purchased it. I’ve been hooked ever since and have bought and returned books all over the country as the program is at most major (and even secondary) airports nationwide.
Now I know many people are thinking, why not get a kindle? Call me old-school or maybe even nostalgic, but I really do enjoy the feeling of a book in my hands. I like turning the pages and being able to visualize my progress as I finish each chapter. I also find that books aren’t affected as much by water, sand or anything else that could potentially destroy an electronic device. Old habits die hard!
