Thanks for taking the time to read this. You know, I really should do that more often, give you a big thank you for taking the time out of your day to read my little blog. You see, to me, a lifelong avid reader, I find reading one of the most valuable thing that human beings can do.

And here’s where this weeks blog post comes in.

I’ve been harbouring a thought for some time now and it’s basically this. Why do people watch the same films over and over again but don’t read the same books repeatedly?

I mean, I’ve seen all the Carry On films multiple times; Camping and Up The Khyber at least a dozen or more each, and the amount of times Ange and I have seen The Naked Gun must be nearing twenty by now. As for Withnail & I, well, I’d say it was unquantifiable.

Compare that with the books that I have re-read.

There are a few I’ve re-read and re-read again – Three Men in a Boat, Catch 22, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Diary of a Nobody, The Woman in White, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Blott on the Landscape and one or two others. And as a child I re-read the Willard Price Adventure series manifold times with such youthful eagerness that the books started to fall apart from over use.

But all of those books fill me with such rapturous joy that I find it such a pleasure to tread such familiar ground over and over again and it never feels boring, dull or samey.

I also know one person who has re-read my first novel Ah Boy! because they found it so wonderful. Wow! What an accolade. That meant so much to me to hear that.

But by and large, people don’t re-read books and I haven’t understood it until now. I haven’t understood why people would spend up to and well beyond a tenner to buy something fabulous like a book only to read it once and then stick on a shelf to gather dust.

The answer, of course, is that books require a fair amount of effort on the part of the reader, whereas watching a film requires very little from the viewer. Unless it’s one of those arty European things that leave you wondering where the hell the last two hours of your life went and damn well wanting them back.

A novel, on average, will take between 6 to 12 hours to complete. It involves visualising the world you are immersing yourself into and picturing the characters that populate it. You have to remember details that happened hundreds of pages ago and it’s rare that you’ll finish a novel in one sitting. Especially those airport blockbusters that double as door stops or foundation stones.

A movie, on the other hand, will take up about two to three hours of your time and everything you need to know to follow it is displayed on screen. They require very little imagination to participate as all the imaginative stuff has been taken care of for you. All you have to do is sit back in comfort and watch it unfold. Just relax with your popcorn or your pick’n’mix and let it all happen.

I’m not decrying movies, I love to watch a good film as much as the next person; I’m just trying to form a contrast here.

Let’s take The Lord of the Rings as a prime example.

Now, I confess, I’ve never actually read the books and am unlikely to in my lifetime (although I have read The Hobbit) as I find all that fantasy stuff just a tad too confusing. I don’t deny Tolkien’s genius for what he created; blimey, I wish I could do something as epic as that if I had half as much talent as he had, but it’s just not a genre I enjoy.

That being said, I take any of my various hats off to anyone who has taken the time to read those books. I imagine it to be a mammoth, nay almost Herculean task of reading. The level of concentration required must be immense but also, I assume, highly enjoyable and ultimately rewarding for fans of Tolkien and indeed the fantasy genre itself.

Of course, The Lord of the Rings, as we all know, was made into a movie franchise earlier this century and I have seen the three films. Each one being about three hours long.

I still couldn’t explain exactly what was going on but I got the gist that Frodo and his chums had to destroy a ring to rid their world of evil and all those pus-filled orcs that were making life thoroughly unpleasant for everyone.

And, I enjoyed the films. They were a marvellous bit of escapism. Likewise, if there was nothing else on the telly (and very often there isn’t) I’ll watch them again. The sheer scale of the scenery and battle scenes are nothing short of breath-taking and demand the viewer pays attention. And of course, I’m not alone in that. Millions of people across the globe have seen those movies multiple times. Well why wouldn’t they? They’re astonishing purely from a cinematic point of view even if, like me, you don’t fully understand what’s going on on screen.

But conversely, I believe there are millions of copies of Tolkien’s Masterpiece sitting on bookshelves all over the world that have either been read once or not even at all. With the success of the film there was a huge global increase in sales of the books, but, how many people actually took the time to plough through them. Especially now they know how it ends from the movies.

Still, they look impressive on the shelf when people visit, don’t they?

As I said at the start, reading is one of the most valuable things that human beings can do. Can you imagine a world without reading? We’d probably still be hitting each other over the head with stone axes and hiding from sabre toothed tigers while grunting ‘Ugg!’ at various intervals.

But reading has advanced humankind further and faster than would otherwise have been possible. Reading helps us to learn, to develop as people, to enlarge our thinking and it provides us with some bloody good entertainment along the way.

So, in conclusion, I’d just like to try and encourage you to re-read your books. Take a few hours out of you day and sink gently between the soft, caressing pages and let the words wash over you like waves of blissful familiarity. Take that copy of Dickens off the shelf that’s been there since 1998, blow the dust of the jacket and devour the sumptuous literary feast contained within. Return once again to Mutch Wants Moor because you found it so hysterical the first time and you feel in need of a good laugh.

Ok, ok, so that last example was a poor attempt at subliminal messaging.

But please do hear what I’m saying folks. Books are just the best so show yours some love. Switch off the old goggle box, turn off Netflix, put down that Blu-Ray disc, give the local fleapit a miss and open a book instead. Your mind will thank you for it.