Gradually, light starts to filter past the curtains. A vehicle went past the house about an hour ago, probably a pickup truck, but now a few more cars are zooming along the once-quiet street. And in the house itself, a sound or two can be heard, maybe an alarm or an elaborate yawn. The sun is coming up, that pickup truck was more than likely on its way to a busy construction site, and the other inhabitants of the house are getting ready for the day's battle.
Time to close the covers of your book and get some sleep!
How many times has something like that happened to you? I used to be a late-night reader, and . . . alright, alright, I admit it . . . if I didn't necessarily pull all that many true all-nighters, I almost always read for a few hours before sleep. And it wasn't limited to a late night thing: I would spend a few hours with a book during the afternoon, at the beach, in a tree . . . or whatever situation/location was handy. When I was a kid, I was called just about every variation of "bookworm" and I kicked some serious ass every year in the Read-a-thon.
At the time, I never questioned why I might be reading so many books. Books were awesome! That was about the sum of it. While I might have developed a few critical faculties in the intervening years, I think I'll stick to that phrase as my rallying point: books are awesome!
A related question: what kind of a book would keep me up late reading? Why would I do it? Several explanations come to mind.
Lengthy Reading Queue
This was probably the number one explanation for epic bouts of reading when I was younger, and the problem of a long list hasn't gotten any easier! I wanted to experience as much of the amazing stuff out there as I could; I've refined my methods for finding new books and gotten considerably more jaded since then, but the fact remains that there will always be a larger pile on the to-read stack than on the completed. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure how to make peace with this. Maybe I'll still be around when the newest generation of ebook readers comes with a brainjack.
However, having a long list of books to read is not the full explanation. When I was a kid, I clearly remember burning through a stack of books from the library, and then re-reading other books in that long stretch of time before I could go back. Some of those books would still keep me up, even on the second or third time through.
Headlong Pace and/or Overwhelming Odds
I often point to Timothy Zahn as an example of a writer who has a knack for pacing. His books have just enough characterization and depth to leave the reader satisfied, but the story is the focus, and the story unfolds with uncanny grace and speed. I'm currently reading his Dragonback series, and while it's a bit too far towards YA for my tastes, he gets me hooked immediately. And Zahn usually pitches the odds against the protagonists in his books on the overwhelming side, and then shows us how those odds are beaten. His Conqueror series is one of my favorites for that reason.
A book can grab a reader through other tactics. For example, with William Gibson's latest two books, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, I simply couldn't sit down and read for a long time. The writing made me take my time, pushed me out, even. Letting the reader go is just a different tactic with a different goal in mind; as I'll mention in a minute, not all books that seize my attention last all that long in my affection.
Anticipation
I associate the whole notion of anticipation as a fuel for long stretches of reading most closely with Harry Potter. I'm a bit outside of the phenomenon, since I've only read the first four Harry Potter books and I never felt too motivated to rush out at midnight and buy the subsequent volumes. It's been interesting to observe though: it's not often that a cultural mania like Rowling's happens, and who knows if it will happen again. The kids who were up late on a school night reading Harry Potter . . . will they find something else on the printed page or will they go back to other media?
My personal example of anticipation would be Tad Williams's To Green Angel Tower. Nowadays we're a bit spoiled with a resurgence of fantasy, but back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was bouncing between Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and Piers Anthony—fine if you were a fan, but not terribly deep stuff. So when Williams's The Dragonbone Chair came out, it was quite a nice change. Williams always had his own problems, notably a high page count (not always a bad thing for a certain demographic of fantasy fan), but the writing was decent and the depth was definitely there. This was also back during a huge Michael Whelan phase for me, so I loved the cover art for this series. Stone of Farewell continued the saga, and it seemed like Williams was going to do everything possible to wrap up the series in one last volume. The years between the books were agonizing!
I bought the hardcover of To Green Angel Tower the day it came out in March 1993, and I surfaced 17 hours later. I ate a few items of a food-like nature here and there, and I did the opposite process in the meantime as well, but I didn't sleep and I certainly didn't go to class.
Was it worth it? Maybe. I remember being disappointed at the ending—without too much in the way of spoilers, I'll say that the antagonist pulled a trick on the protagonist that might have been clever as the ending of a short story but made me feel cheated for having slogged through 3000 pages in total, never mind a full day of living in the deep vein thrombosis danger zone.
I've never done anything like that day since then.
Surprise
This is the opposite of anticipation—you sit down to read a book and you find that you can't stop reading it. It's not a book you knew much about, so it's not like the seventh book of the Dark Tower series and you've been waiting twenty-five years for the conclusion. It's fresh, unexplored territory. The book that you can't put down is such a reviewer's cliché, but it does happen, and I still crave that experience, both of finding something new and finding something new that's also good.
Ironically, I find that the qualities that might make a book un-putdownable do not necessarily make for longevity. Case in point: Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. I picked up Lynch's book a few weeks ago; I sat down with it and basically got up hours later when I was done. The pages seemed to be turning themselves! These blurbish words were not on the back cover, but they may as well have been.
But then I went online to see what other people thought about the book. Since I didn't know anything about the book beforehand, I was curious. That's when my appreciation for the book began to break down. For example, I found myself agreeing with most of the points that were raised in the review of the sequel right here on Strange Horizons. I have no answer for charges like "Lynch's complete failure to engage with politics in any meaningful way." All the same, I was hooked while reading the book, and whether I read it again or not, the glossy and jam-packed qualities of the book wrapped me up and carried me along on the initial reading.
Does This Still Happen?
As I've been writing this, I've been comparing my current reading habits to those of my younger self. That's because I simply don't have the same crazy marathons anymore.
What's changed? Have books gotten worse? No, I don't think so (see my earlier link about the resurgence of fantasy), despite alarmism along those lines in some circles. I'm certainly a more jaded reader than I used to be, but I still run into books that hit my buttons. Have I just gotten older? No longer capable of reading late at night, due to the stresses of a grown-up life?
That's not it either, since I'm up late—granted, maybe not as often—doing other things. And that's the answer: those other things have crowded out reading, to an extent that is starting to make me uncomfortable. I feel guilty sometimes if I haven't read anything in a while and I don't want reading to be a chore!
What are those other things? I've played a lot of videogames in the last decade and a half. I've filled an RSS reader with more blogs and sites than I have time to check every day—time well wasted, as the saying goes.
A far bigger factor currently that's crowding out reading: TV on DVD. This is a dangerous situation, and it's only getting worse. I remember the first time I encountered this phenomenon: it was a Saturday morning in 2005 and I had just gotten a hold of the first season of Battlestar Galactica. I figured I would watch a few scenes while eating my breakfast, see what the show was like. Later that day—much later—I was done with the first season completely! Since then I've been catching up on more shows than I'd like to contemplate, everything from Arrested Development to the whole Buffy/Angel universe.
I mark it down to the industrial strength hooks that these shows have to sink into the viewer in order to make them come back a full week later. Ok, that's fine enough for first airing, but what happens when you have all 12 or 22 episodes in a box right on your coffee table? It gets way too easy to just press play again, damn the consequences.
In one sense, though, that's perfectly fine with me. I have to agree with Orson Scott Card: there have been some truly brilliant shows on the air in the last few years. So I'll fit in some old-fashioned book reading when I can, but otherwise I'll catch up on the good stuff elsewhere. I'm like those kids in their post-Harry Potter phase giving nightmares to the educators who pinned their literacy hopes on the boy wizard. Is literacy per se tied to one form of media? Or can creativity in any format stimulate the brain equally or sufficiently? I'd like to think so, but that sounds like a topic for another day!