Could Your Book Obsession Be Lethal?
I’m quite comfortable with devising tortuous and deadly encounters for my heroines, I certainly put Tyler through the wringer in Lost Reaper, but it never occurred to me that reading books can be just as dangerous.
I mean, you would think reading is a fairly passive exercise. Then I thought about the reading habits I cultivated as a teenager (many years ago) and realised just how wrong I was.
Most book lovers would be familiar with the one-handed mode of operation. I could make a cup of tea, water the yard and complete most of the chores my mother set me with a book in one hand. I might have risked scalding myself with my tea, but at least my life wasn’t in danger.
At high school I would often walk from classroom to classroom while reading and I could not count the amount of times a teacher would confiscate my book because I’d been reading during class. Other than walking into a pole or winding up in detention, again, not so bad.
On sports days my friends and I would skip school to hang out at the library. We were such rebels. No smoking behind the toilets, skulking around the shopping centres or running wild in the streets for us. No, we rebelled by expanding our minds, escaping into other worlds and feeding our imaginations. It wouldn’t have been fun to get caught skipping school, but I could have lived with the punishment.
It was when I was on the way home from the library that I really put my life on the line. Unable to resist the lure of a new book, I would ride with one propped open on the handlebars of my bike. I have no idea how I did not have an accident whilst engaged in this most precarious of reading situations.
That gets me to wondering, how many other avid readers out there have risked their lives for the sake of a good book?
Does anyone else have a tale of death-defying book devotion to share?
How far would you go to read just one more chapter?
Shelley Russell Nolan 
I used to get my exercise by going for a good hour’s walk, reading all the way. That all went well until the day I walked right into a big pile of dirt someone had left on the lawn near the curb coming down Kerrigan Street – I went head-first into it and got scrapes and grazes from hard chunks of dirt and rocks that were in it. Needless to say, I ensured that the book didn’t get damaged!
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Nice save. Ouch for the rest. We do tend to get tunnel vision when reading. Which is great, it means we are reading a good book when the story blocks out the world around us. Love it when that happens.
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