Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

 I'm done clearing the way in my collection for new/old stuff to come in. I've been going through my game collection and culling out some things and shipping them off to Noble Knight (free plug) for trade credit and turning old games into ... well, old games again, but at least it's old games that I actually want.

I'm also reading again for pleasure, something that I haven't done in a long, long time.

I read to my kids, of course. Right now we're in book three of the Percy Jackson series, and I'm enjoying it as much as they are - even though they fall asleep about five to ten minutes into reading each night. I've read The Hobbit, The Colour of Magic, and the first two Percy Jackson books to them. They really dig it, and I really love reading to them.

I haven't read for pleasure really since before college - higher education killed my love of reading. Up through High School, I read a lot - mostly fantasy and sci-fi. When I was in Junior High, or Middle School for some of you folks out there, I remember reading the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.

It was a big white book, the "Collector's Edition" that compiled all three books into one. It was a massive book and clocked in at 1,030 pages. When I set out to read it, it made me nervous, but I made my way through it. I remember when I finished it, I felt a real sense of accomplishment.

I would also put my bookmark in the book, then look at it from the top, sort of measuring how much I'd read. At first, I measured in millimeters, then it was centimeters, and finally, inches. The thicker the bunch of paper on the left-side of the bookmark got, the more proud I got. I read that thing for weeks.

Then high school and college came around and I was subjected to books I didn't care about. I also really got into film. Film is a passive medium, you sit and watch and absorb what you're seeing. It's a story shown to you using a different set of senses than a book does, so it's not necessarily less work, but different work.

When I had to put down books that I were interested in and had to read textbooks instead, or really read anything that wasn't the least bit interesting to me, I stopped caring. In fact, with the exception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in my Western Civilization class, none of the books I read in college were interesting to me. None. They put me to sleep. Literally.

I transitioned to listening to audio books, since I had to commute to work, school, and home. Reading became a passive thing for me. Now, I've listened to countless audiobooks, and there are some stellar ones out there. The Dresden Files series, the Song of Ice and Fire books, Ready Player One, and the Expanse novels all come readily to mind.

So, I thought I'd start reading again, and while I had meant to start this last night, things came up, tonight, I plan on not turning on the television ... and reading.

Now, I'm reading The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato right now, and it's a good read. I know it's not a groundbreaking epic of a story or anything, but it's something I want to read.

I've been slowly getting novels from the past that I haven't read in well over fifteen years, and it has surprised me what books came to mind for me when I said to myself, "What books would you read over again?"

Well, of course, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is one of those books that comes right to mind for me, but I've read it probably half-a-dozen times and it's one of those novels that I've managed to constantly have a copy of on my shelf, so that one's not a priority. I'm thinking of books that I've read that were fun, perhaps easy-reads, that made me smile when I thought of them.

Slowly, these books are arriving. None of them were expensive to get - and I could have just purchased the e-book versions of them, but I wanted to hold them in my hands and read them, physically turning the pages  on them like I did years ago. I have nothing against e-books - the books I read my kids are on my Kindle app - I just want that experience again of measuring where I am in a book.

The Forgotten Realms Phlan Trilogy was one I read a long time ago, I think in Junior High as well. I got Pool of Radiance because of the gold-box SSI video game we had on our Commodore and, eventually, on our my brother's Packard Bell 486DX2 computer. I never did beat the game, but I found the novel one day while browsing at (probably) Borders, and picked it up.

Little did I know, it was part of a trilogy. There really wasn't any indication that it was part of a trilogy if memory serves, but I later stumbled on Pool of Darkness and Pools of Twilight. I don't recall if I read either of those, but I have them now, so I will read them at some juncture.

I never read a lot of D&D books, to be honest. I read the Dragonlance Chronicles and the Pool of Radiance book and that's about it. I bought several others, but never picked them up to read. I remember owning a copy of Spellfire by Ed Greenwood and some other generic D&D novels from back in the 90's, but never being too into them. I didn't read the Lord of the Rings until my girlfriend at the time made me in the early 2000's. I was always more into science fiction, I suppose.