Reading Rituals ps: Lauren you are ridiculous

Reading
It is interesting all the things one reads in a day without even realizing it. Notes, calorie count on the back of your morning yogurt, Signs while going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth, road signs, the back of the towing ticket I got on Monday, the list is infinite and could possibly go on forever. Which brings me to the interesting point of reading a book, which I have recently became acquaintances with. I studied the picture of the immigrant Japanese mother and daughter before even opening up the book. It read “Nisei Daughter”1. What an interesting title, full of secrets which I was about to uncover. I flipped to the third page, because we all obviously know there is nothing important really on the first or second page.2 I found some annoyance with the sand papery texture of the pages. Life would be so much easier and more joyful if the pages were just white. I started to read the black doodles on the page, my eyes shifting from left to right, barely blinking because that is what your eyes do when you are reading something you like. You do not want to miss those moments of things you could have read while your eyes were closed in a fast blink. After an hour or so slithered by, my eyelids started to get weighty as if an imaginary finger were pressing them down, forbidding me to go any further.

1. “Nisei” in Japanese means second generation. Second generation daughter. It is not pronounced knee see, but knee say. This is speaking of the main character of the book Monica Sone who lived in the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The American’s foolishly threw all the Japanese into internment camps, only to realize generations later, that they were too busy with themselves to realize they ruined others lives.

2. Why is there never anything important on the first couple of trees. It would astonish anyone who knew how many trees are killed every year for those stupid bear pages in the beginning. Some books however to not follow this common scheme so I cannot generalize, but most books do this. The first page usually consists of the title again, but why? The title is on the cover or the side, therefore it is not needed. The second page usually consists of the title again and the publisher, which is to be repeated again on the next page. Once again, nonsense. Then there is usually a random blank page in the beginning or end, which makes some annoyance into my brain because it makes the book bigger than it really is.