I have recently discovered that I am a lazy reader.  I don't want to have to figure anything out, I just want the author to tell me.  Tell me was the characters are like, give me the adjuctives to describe them.  Tell me the setting and what happens.  Tell me how the story plays out in your mind.  By reading this way, I have finished a vast number of books and enjoyed the stories.  But my focus is shifting.  It's not just the story that's important, the words used to tell the story are just as important. 

As the reader, the experience of reading shifts when you're reading a story by an author that 'shows' instead of 'tells'.  Using sensory details and specific examples to introduce characters and scenes allows the reader to come to their own conclusions.  And the magic of writing is that the reader's conclusion doesn't always match the writers.  It's a different experience to really divule into the scenes and really understand the characters and what makes them tick. 

This realization is going to change how I read and how I write.  and that change scares me.  I'm not sure I'm going to like the change in the end, but I think it's a change I'm going to have to at least experiment with and try out. 

Here's something to read that better explains what I tried to say here:

http://janetburroway.com/writing.htm