Addiction?!

Monday morning
At the office

Swe: So how was weekend?

Me: I finished the book. The series actually that consisted of 4 books.

Swe: 4 books in 4 days?

Me: Hmm pretty much, I started on Wednesday night and finished on Sunday afternoon and there was office and outing on Thursday and Friday.

Swe: I stopped reading after college because I was getting addicted.

Me: May be I am getting too. 

Swe: You already are!

Me: [thoughtful] May be...

I wonder if there is such a thing as reading addiction. When does an interest become a habit, a habit a hobby and a hobby an addiction? I don't quite remember why I started liking reading. During the early days of school it was more so because we had a separate period for library and issuing a book was a more or less mandatory and since I never disliked reading, I always finished them before returning. It is not really that the books I read all belonged to library. Books were something I could buy anytime - no questions asked. :) After Xth it wasn't mandatory but we still had the period and I still issued books and I still read them before returning. After XIIth it boiled down to availability and choice. But I didn't much though. I guess I just enough found books never to have really run short of them.

So why do I really liked reading? I don't know. May be they were easier to keep than friends while I moved around. May be they helped me look at the world in a different way, provided me a way to escape. May be there is no reason. May be I got it from my parents or my brother. I don't know why I started but I know why I continue even now.

It starts as an effort to distract myself from thinking something. Something that makes me furious or sad or confused or scared. Something that I don't want to think about, something that I don't want to talk about, something that I don't have control over, something that makes feel helpless or hopeless. Something that keeps me awake when I so badly want to sleep. Or may be starts as an effort to drown the silence when I don't have anything to think about. And so I pick up a book. A book where I can drown myself so completely that I do not hear the voice or the silence anymore. Somewhere the story-line catches my interest and I read for the story itself forgetting the reason why I had picked up the book. Sometimes one book is enough and sometimes I continue to another and one more till I have exhausted myself. Till I look beside me and find a pile of finished books. And then I don't have anymore books to read. And I try to find one more. Buy, borrow or simply re-read something from my collection.

So would you call it an addiction? I don't miss my office or food. Sleep, I might miss sometimes. Although I can't guarantee that I would have slept soundly if I had not been reading. Friends or society - whatever you want to call that I would have missed even without the book. Or so I think. So... am I addicted?

And yet I don't think I have read a lot of books. So how can I say that I am addicted? If your answer is yes, may be I should start taking reading a little more seriously - just to comply to your opinion.