I'm Slow with Old Age!

Man. That whole "reading for pleasure" thing is amazing.
Although, the enjoyment I once got from sitting down with a good book is a bit marred now. I've grown a lot as a reader and a writer since my care-free days of reading Animorphs and Baby Sitters Club with blissful ignorance of structure and whatnot. Now, everything is too predictable. I pick out the choice of plot/character development the author is going with and then I figure out the whole story too quickly. I try not to; maybe that's why I read books so intensely. Try to not give myself time to think about it so maybe I can race my brain and be surprised by otherwise predictable plot-twists.
The other problem I have, is because I love fantasy so much and I'm such a geek, I am bored by any slow-paced explanations. For instance, I started reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer yesterday (I finished it and read half of the second book, which I finished today... I am now half through the third). It's fantastic; I love her writing which is shocking because I normally hate stories told in the first person. But she does a good job (she's no Stephen Brust, but her narrative style is still pretty good). The characters are great. The story is fantastic; it's not super exciting to me though. That's only because I pretty much grew up reading Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton novels, so the whole vampire-werewolf thing is dull to me.
Nothing super unique is out there, that I've found at least, so while the story is probably more exciting to someone less familiar with vampire-werewolf culture, to me it's a little old. I enjoy the way Meyer tells it, but it's not new, and that upsets me.
You see, I used to have such a clear, innocent pleasure in reading a book. I just liked escaping reality, dissociating into the fantasy worlds that I wished I could live in, filled with magic, vampires, elves, etc. All that good, geeky, Tolkien-y/Anne Rice-y stuff.
I used to stay up all night, not sleeping a wink for several days, to finish an entire series. I remember reading all of the Sweet Valley High books (I know, right?) in fourth grade in the span of days. A book a night. I used to not to be able to sleep unless I'd read, and I used to find it impossible, literally impossible, to stop reading until I finished the book I was reading. Seriously. I still get that compulsion now; I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in a straight 19 hours, non-stop. No food or anything. I used to read much faster... It's terribly embarrassing at this age to admit it, but from sixth until seventh grade I read one of the Harry Potter books every night. I have literally read some of them over a hundred times. I love reading series' over and over again because I always find something slight I missed the other times. I make new connections throughout each book in the series and I love it when that happens. That's another thing I adore Stephen Brust for; his plots, characters, histories, etc. are all so detailed and vivid and intricate. Every time I reread one of his books I make a new connection to something totally awesome in the story.
In case you didn't know/can't tell, Stephen Brust is my favorite author ever. Like, if I could read only one author for the rest of my life, it would be him, hands down.
Anyway, I was getting at complaining that my reading has slowed down considerably in recent years. I can still crank out a pretty heavy book in a single night, but it takes longer. It took me 8 hours to read roughly 700 pages, and back in middle school I easily could have read probably two or three hundred more than that.
I miss the days that all the stories were brand new to me, when nothing was old or over done. When I would lay in bed after finishing a book at four in the morning on a school night, and stay awake the rest of the night rereading the book in my head, but taking characters from the books I tried to write myself and sticking them into the plot. It was fantastic fun.

But I haven't had any new characters to do that with in years.
I have too many other, more adult-y things on my mind at night that keep me from sleeping, instead of simply using my hours to sleep bidding my time till I could go back to the computer and write more.
Now, I stay up all night unable sleep because Jon isn't there, or worrying about getting a job, whether to change my major, wondering what life would have been like if I had gone to American University like I was supposed to, wondering how I'll afford my medicine after I graduate, why my parents are the way the are and how it's affected me, trying to form a coherent career path, trying to decipher what I even want to make of myself... so many worries, fears, anxieties.
When I was a kid racked with insomnia, my thoughts were only filled with trying to think of cool names for the characters I'd made up earlier that day.


I miss those times. The days I didn't know any better.
The days I could write.
They were fantastic.