BOOKS.
My world is filled with them. As an ADF dedicant, you read. A lot. Not only that, but due to my lack of formal higher education, I am having to read a great deal of crap to fill the gaps in my knowledge in order to fully understand the material I am working with. I used to be a much faster reader, but the MS has caused a deficit in my short term memory. Still, my entire life has been centered on my prodigious reading skills.
I learned how to read before kindergarten, and by the time I was in the 1st grade the teachers began to recognize that I was far beyond the abilities of my peers. I was in my own reading group throughout most of elementary school, even when they held me back in the 4th grade because of my complete lack of math skills (my school district had some purely evil policies about how your math and language skills had to be on par with each other, which meant you were held at whichever skill was the lowest. They destroyed so many lives this way.) I was reading at a college level before junior high and could read 1,000 words per minute with a 90% comprehension rate. Consequently, I ended up reading many books at an age where I wasn’t socially or emotionally able to understand them. I read “The Hobbit” when I was 7, “The Exorcist” at 9, and many of the classics such as Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky before I was old enough to menstruate. Of course I remember very little of these books today. After all, who can comprehend Nihilism when you are still looking forward to Sesame Street each afternoon?
I have always had a large collection of books, and tragically I have no place to put them all. I still have books from my childhood, books that belonged to my mother, antique books, and self-published books from friends. I collect all the supernatural and ancient history themed Time-Life series* for fun, and I used to have a huge collection of fairy tales and nursery rhymes that has been picked clean by scavengers and the sands of time. At least a good 85% of my books are non-fiction. I really don’t enjoy fiction, it has to be something pretty exceptional for me to want to read it. I have books on the social history of crying, books about prostitution in the Weimar Republic, books about the correlations of death and eroticism in art, books about people who claim to have been brainwashed by the CIA to be Boxcar Willie’s sex slave (this is a real book. I am not kidding). The majority of my books cover the following subjects: sex, religion, history, anthropology, death, and mayhem. I have spent decades scouring used bookstores, Powell’s, yard sales, and researching catalogs like Loompanics, Amok, and Feral House to flesh out my library of the transmundane, lascivious, and macabre. And I want more.
I calculated that for the ADF Dedicant/Clergy program plus the Bardic studies program I will probably have to read between 75-200 books, depending on how in depth I want to be. My memory deficit is making this difficult, and so reading has become more of a chore than it once was (I have a tendency to forget what I have read a few pages back and have to do a great deal of re-reading in order to retain the information). Still, I love the process and I love my books.
Oh, and PS, fuck Kindle. I know people love those things, but when the apocalypse comes and you can’t recharge that soulless slice of fuck-all I will still have knowledge, beeyotches.
Ravens and Ivy 