Not that you'll notice any perceptible change in the quality of my reviews

I've decided to give up reading.

I had this sort of revelation today, see. I realized that so much of what I'm looking for from literature is about getting at both sides of the story, whatever the story is. Like, for example: in terms of the gender war, I try to read as many books authored by women as by men. To better respond to the question of quality, I look at the work of a spectrum-spanning assortment of writers--from the mightiest of the mighty Dostoevskys and Pynchons to the lowliest of the low Dan Browns and Don Delillos. I read non-fiction to learn how the world really is, and fiction to learn how the world could be. Short stories let me perceive things impossibly small, while novels let me subsume into myself the infinite and the ungraspable.

But some deeper primal knowledge has eluded my grasp for about 27 years. Not even my forays into the Derridadian meta-divide between literature and literary criticism could allow me access to an elevated understanding of the one fundamental, ultimate, and true binary pairing through which lens we all come to know works of literary value.

That's the division between the literate and the illiterate. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, as of September 2006, there are 780,923,753 illiterate adults worldwide. That's approximately 17.8 percent of the world's population that has a completely different view of literature than you or I do.

Well, than I currently do, I should say. While I have been assured that the lobotomy procedure should be painless (in fact, once complete, I shan't remember a moment of it), I'll admit I'm uneasy about taking such a drastic step. But I'm confident in my decision, knowing that once I'm back on my feet, my carers leading me by the hand through the most seemingly common of daily tasks, I shall be able to report for duty as the first totally illiterate blogger in the entire litblogosphere. By combining new podcasting technology with an innovative new round-the-clock recording set-up, I shall be able to communicate, via sub-literate and unintelligible grunts and moans, my feelings, thoughts, critiques, and criticisms of the literary landscape from the perspective of one who is wholly unable to engage with literature in any way, shape, or form.

Oh, sure, I'll paw at the pages of books placed before me while gutturally shrieking my discontent with the unconscious knowledge that something once familiar has forevermore been stripped from my being, and I'll also likely also crash my car into bookstores, which I imagine will doubtlessly happen, what with my being unable to follow the directions posted on street signs. Perhaps I'll even burn my entire book collection, the inescapable result of my inability to read the warnings printed on bottles of lighter fluid. But as for the deeper communion with printed text that I have spent so much of my life enraptured with--well, my post-operative barks, yelps, and squawks will be far more indicative of my new found state of mind than anything I could think to type up here, from my comfy seat in the ivory tower of literate privilege.