Reading a novel

Yeah. Things are that bad. Can't remember the last time I made an attempt. High school perhaps. Never been a reader. Which is a funny thing because they used to call me bookworm in primary school. Didn't understood where they got that from. All I lived for then was football, and whatever other games were in season.

There was this one time this chic really surprised me. We were meant to be rehearsing a song for some thing and she was in charge. Girls were always in charge. Anyway, me and another guy were playing football at the far end of the room or hall or whatever. With a bottle top. She got all cross at some point. Something about our lack of seriousness and how immature we were. I was a bit pained, in between the feelings of shock at her tirade. But I quickly concluded that if being mature meant I couldn't play around with a pekelee, I wasn't interested.

And when the Hardy Boys bug hit around the same time people were "maturing", I missed out. It took me an eternity to read through one of them mysteries, the times I tried. Couldn't understand how other people finished them so fast. And it's been the same ever since. The fatter the book, the more terrifying. The more likely I was not to get past page 10, or whatever I'd managed in the first sitting. I scraped through high school literature without once reading Mine Boy or Shamba la Wanyama from cover to cover. I just couldn't do it.

But now I'm attempting to read. Why? To stave off alzheimer's. It seems the older you get, the more things you do out of requirement, rather than really wanting to. You run around to keep the diabetes at bay and the like. So if it's not this novel, it's crosswords. Or sudoku. Shudder.