When Do You Read?
When do you read? Seriously, with all the things competing for my time I often find it difficult to sit down and read, hence the recent brownout in this blog. Sure, I could have posted some other small bits of news or observation but I still feel that the main reason why you’d read the Used Books Blog is for the book reviews. And I’m a big proponent of quality over quantity, so I’m not going to just go back in time and write paragraph reviews of the hundreds (thousands?) of books I’ve read in the course of my life.
The main reason I have less time now is that I’m no longer commuting by BART (SF train/subway system) into the city a couple of times a week. The half hour ride each way meant I could get in two to three extra hours of reading each week without breaking a proverbial sweat. Don’t fret, I’m not out of work, just working from home a lot more than usual. That leaves me reading before I go to bed and … sadly, I’m just not reading anything that has kept me awake longer than 10 pages a night.
This current brownout also occurred because I started and didn’t finish two books - VALIS by Philip K. Dick and Preston Falls by David Gates. The former was going to be a Retro Review, timed with it’s prominent appearance on the television show Lost.
I’ve read VALIS once in college for a Science Fiction course. (Yeah, it sounds cool but wasn’t as much as you’d think.) I began re-reading it for the review and again found it … interesting but maddening (no pun intended) at the same time. I don’t care what other Philip K. Dick fans says, this isn’t his best work. I will review VALIS in the near future.
Preston Falls on the other hand just never really grabbed me and I had problems connecting with the main character, a New York City Ad Man in mid-life crisis getting drunk and shooting things in upstate New York. I rarely put books down, and I hope I return to Preston Falls but my bookshelf is full of other interesting material.
But I digress.
When do you read? Turns out there’s not a tremendous amount of information on this topic but I did manage to dig up the following statistics from the National Literacy Trust in the UK.
- A survey of 1,000 people for Bedtime Reading Week 2002 found the most popular place to read was in bed (65% of the sample). 25% relax with a book in the bath, 10% take a book to the loo (mainly men), almost half like to read on holiday and a third read on the journey to work. Over a third of those interviewed said they wish they had more time to read.
- An online survey of 1,432 workers, by the TUC for Quick Reads and World Book Day 2006, found that … 55.3% find the time to read for leisure during their lunch breaks. But it is a lack of time for 62.1% that stops them from reading more.
There’s a lot to digest in those stats (like whether waterproof books might increase reading) but at the end of the day it seems that time is our enemy, something all of us seem to have less of despite technological advances. Perhaps it’s the active nature of reading, versus passive nature of TV, Film and Music, that makes reading a bit daunting for even die-hard readers.
So when do you read?
