On avid readers and voracious reading
Who is a reader? The Cambridge dictionary defines a "reader" as someone who reads for pleasure, as someone who reads voraciously. I agree with this definition. In my mind, a reader is someone who reads whatever happens to cross her eyes, it may even be an advertisement or a junk article in a scrap of newspaper in which a parcel or some salted moongphali came wrapped in. A reader seeks out something to read; he begs, borrows, downloads, buys, steals books and other reading material. For him, reading is compulsive behaviour. On being asked if there are books that qualify as "comfort read" for him, the Pulitzer-winning Dominican-American author Junot D í az replied that he is an incorrigible reader, that reading itself "is the comfort". Perfect! What makes a reader? It is my partner S's hypothesis that teenage years are the deadline for a person becoming a reader. If a person is not a reader (in the sense defined above) by the time she is stepping out o...