Novels, unfortunately, not a valid reason to skip class

As the specter of my first round of midterms looms shakily on the horizon, and I’m already… As the specter of my first round of midterms looms shakily on the horizon, and I’m already fried on caffeine and no sleep, I look at my bookshelf despondently. “Goodbye, old friends,” I want to tell my books. “We’ll meet again in April.”

It’s the ultimate college irony — getting an education severely limits the time we have to learn on our own. Between midterms and papers and presentations on the possible effects of tuberculosis on the noble zebra fish, we don’t have time to read for pleasure.

Syllabus week reveals that many of us aren’t reading anyway. Whenever some earnest English professor goes around the classroom and asks for our names, majors and what we read, I brace for impact.

Someone’s going to hem and haw. Someone’s going to mention that, despite the fact that he or she might be an English writing major, they don’t really read much outside of what’s required for school.

I’m not that snotty about it either. If people were to reveal that they read only she-of-the-trashy-romance-novel Nora Roberts, I’d be fine with that. Instead, they mumble something about not liking to read, and suddenly I wish that my pen were mightier than a sword, so I could stab them in the ear canal with it. OK, calming down now.

For those of us for whom the written word is more essential than oxygen, not reading is like slow strangulation. Who wants to pore over course packs or equations when there are Michael Chabon novels, comic books and beatnik memoirs? Who wants to devote precious mental energy to memorizing trivialities that will be drained bathtub-style the next day? There are millions of pages to be turned, millions of characters to be met, millions of mysteries to be solved and millions of plots to be unraveled — and not one of them will be on my physics quiz.

Of course, I’m making a value judgment here. Nothing keeps television addicts, for example, from making the same arguments about their drug of choice. But reading, unlike watching television, isn’t just a one-way medium. Reading requires active imagination and response. For all but the most devoted TV fans, most shows are distractions, not inspirations. Hours of reading don’t leave me with the same sticky-mouthed, brain-dead feeling that watching that much television would.

There’s an easy solution to all this: drop out of school. Don’t worry, Mom, Dad and all those other lovely people funding my education; I won’t go through with it. The Pennsylvania economy sucks, and even if it didn’t, there’s not really a market for fiction-and-ecology-major dropouts.

Think of the possibilities, though: reading for reading’s sake — at a pace set not by syllabi or schedules — for the sheer pleasure of absorbing language and knowledge. Thinking about this gives me the sort of illicit, wonderful thrill that Homer Simpson gets around donuts. Mmm … knowledge.

Instead, reading for pleasure during the semester has to be covert. After all the important lessons we got during freshman year about Proper Time Management and The Importance of Networking — whatever that is — reading seems sinful because it’s not for class and is done alone.

“I’m sorry. I had important novels to catch up on” usually isn’t a good enough excuse as to why I didn’t go to class or out with friends.

So goodbye, good friends. Goodbye to your cracked bindings and dust-gathering pages. Goodbye, Joe Kavalier and Rorschach and Diane DiPrima. I’ll miss you.

Pay Sydney Bergman’s library fines at sbergman@pittnews.com.