A Reader's Freedom

After a long seven years, I'm graduating this weekend with my MDiv.  It's been a good process for me.  the formal academic discipline imposed a clear set of expectations for learning, and that's good when I tend to be on the undisciplined side of the ball generally.  

however:

Grad school has a major paradox in the fact that it forbids success to anyone who does not genuinely love to read.  If you don't like to read, a Masters is simply not for you, my friend.  but the paradox comes in the fact that the demands of school impose very tight boundaries on your reading choices, so that pure pleasure reading can become a practical impossibility.

So, over the past seven years, I've been able to sneak a book here and there, over christmas break or occasionally in the summertime (my hardest time to read vocationally).  But I've generally felt like any time I was reading something that wasn't listed on a syllabus, I was committing literary adultery.  A furtive moment with a book before bed or while pooping simply was all I have really allowed myself.  

And thus my gratitude for my freedom renewed.  

Now I feel like I can regain the part of myself that absolutely loves to read.  I used to read voraciously:  at lunch, before bed, in the morning, in my office, pretty much anywhere and everywhere.  I have sincerely missed that part of myself.  But no longer!  I have jumped into Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, and anticipate some morning time with Herodotus in the coming days.  

Coming days?  Nah.  Right now.  Enough blogging for this morning...I've got a book to read.  

I do solicit recommendations.