Let's start with James Patterson.....

When I don't feel like writing, I search for distraction. Whether I find it in a delightful conversation with a beautiful young lady or in the sanctuary of my room watching a Sixers game or an episode of one of the numerous TV series that I follow, I find that it all brings me back to one place. It causes me, in a round-about way to revert to a state in which I can think. The proverbial light bulb in my head can be triggered by that slightest inspiring stimulus. The one thing I wish is that my reluctance to write at any one particular time, may provoke me to read a book.

I used to be an avid reader in my younger days, having learned the skill ahead of most of my fellow schoolmates. My mother was a teacher and maybe that had something to do with it, or maybe I had inherited some of the brilliance that I would later go on to hear her friends and colleagues rave about. I read everything in sight, literature books, science books, even books with words too big for me to fully comprehend at that age.

With prepubescent maturity came the interests in other things. I fell in love with the game of basketball and sacrificed much of my reading time to playing the game and watching NBA games. I did, however, always seem to make time to read right before I fell asleep, maybe half an hour each night. This practice was frowned upon by my parents, although I,then, failed to understand how it affected them. With repeated discouragement of this, I soon gave it up altogether and my reading habits have suffered since then.

To this day, I've struggled to read; extensively. I've written poems that others deem worthy of much praise and have received much adoration for my command of the skill. I have written stories that surprised my teachers at various points throughout my academic career simply because they couldn't believe that I wrote it. But I have struggled to read even books that were necessary to my curricula. I even passed English Lit without actually reading the books.

Recently I tried audio books which work well but seem to be solely for entertainment purposes, since if u get to thinking about a particular word or the use of it for too long you may miss something. They did inspire me to read though, a bit anyway. So I bought a James Patterson novel (I think he's brilliant), the first novel I've ever bought for myself......Let's see how that goes!!!