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My reading wife!

Mine is a ‘reading wife,’ she loves to read anything and everything that comes her way. Her reading habits are interesting since she comes from a society that puts less premium on reading and more on verbal communications.

She is a persistent reader despite the fact our kind of society which is still developing may even look down upon people who read because it is not yet in their social, cultural, psychological make up.

While in other societies it is common to see people holding books and newspapers in public places, such a sight is rarely seen in Jordan or in the different parts of the Arab world where I also lived in. This is why I look with curiosity upon my “reading wife” simply because the reading culture or the book culture is yet to develop. She would munch through myriads of words, flicks pages, and cajole over black text as if it is Turkish delight of meanings and extrapolations.

Its as well as she is not part of the “readerless” society she came from, but she was socialized in this society and later on had the tenacity to pick up books and started to read, opening her mind and indulge in a literature far from her roots, despite the fact she values our Arabic tradition and Islam.

In between getting the house chores, taking the kids to and from school, cooking, cleaning, and taking them, including occasionally me, to the doctors, the flow of her reading today, remains at a constant pace, neither going down nor up but at a steady momentum through out the year.

She manages to find time, closing herself in, finding “reading time” whenever she can. The things that matter she tells me about and even discusses, but modern novels and which many wrongly describe as pulp, she secretly leaves to herself.

I don’t mind me telling you she is putting all of us to shame, since we rarely read and where looking at pages is not really in our blood despite the fact our holy Koran has instructed us it to read, and fathom knowledge even if we have to go to China to acquire it as the saying goes!

She keeps telling me, and sometimes teasing me that we don’t have not the mantle guts to read, nor the energy to understand, we just talk on top of our heads, guided by the easy way out of watching screen and animated images. While I shoot back she too watches television, she replies she is all too in favor of balance.

She makes sure she sticks to a balanced ‘reading’ diet while I sit and envy and sometimes follow suit. She makes it a habit to read on the couch, while the kids are watching television which is frequent during the day, I don’t know how she can actually become so consumed in between the racket of noise, she reads in the bathroom at frequent bouts, and reads in bed despite the fact that she hardly needs to be rocked to sleep late at night.

Hers is an acquired habit of mantle discipline as if she were saying to herself “I’ll put in two or three hours a day to nourish my mind”. She started first reading in the 1980s when she first came to England with one of her first books being Spy Catcher by Peter Wright after the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to ban it from entering the country. She decided to read the book because of the controversy surrounding it which officials said it compromised intelligence.

For her as well this was to be the beginning of a reading journey that blossomed over the years despite the fact that reading and writing is a solitary, lonely confining experience that is two-track, boiling down to the reader and the book or the writer and the computer or pen and/paper.

Because of the nature of our society that stresses kinship, my wife has been and is able to carry on with her reading without compromising any of her social commitments, and certainly away from prying eyes of my mother, father, sister and so on. Her reading is confined to our house which she would nip down to at certain hours of the day or at night time, when we would go down to bed.

Following Spy Catcher, it was on to the books of the late Edward Said including his Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and many others of his volumes which are today standard textbooks on post-colonial societies and how they are developing.

I had bought the books to read one day, as I suppose many people do, but they ended up decorating what become I thought a very interesting English and now increasing Arabic book library, complaining at the same instance I had no time to read because of my supposedly other engagements. She would leave me in my complaints and start reading quietly.

As a housewife she is an ambidextrous reader, reading for knowledge, intellect and sheer curiosity, mantle agility and slog as well as for enjoyment and for memory relaxation, at times when she didn’t want to think or strain her brain.

Combined with as diverse number of books on how to write, Middle East politics and biographies especially on Israeli politicians which I had collected over the years, since the mid-1990s, she began to read increasingly late 20th century fiction, of dabbling her eyes, ears and mind with high-paced novels like those of John Grisham’s which she likes very much, and I must confess I do as well.

She taught me how to read books purely for enjoyment despite the fact that some of which required mantle concentration and I would read for professional writing reasons. It occurred to me after a period of lip-reading and eye text formation, readers start to accumulate what can be recognized as “reading experiences” whereby you become fluent in language and sentence construction, especially when you are editing other people’s work.

Inevitably she accumulated a rich reading experience, while her thought process, I am sure had become more methodical, and I say that precisely because I felt my ideas, and the way I expressed them were becoming more systematic as I red to improve the standard of my quality of writing as by now we where reading more fiction that “surrealized” our lives but on paper.