How to make time for a good book
Image by Ian Wilson via Flickr
Like many people, Gretchen Rubin finds pleasure in books—reading them, writing them, and making them. So the lawyer-turned-writer put “finding more time to read” high on her list of resolutions when she set out to increase her personal happiness, a journey she writes about in her new book The Happiness Project.
While many people squeeze in some reading before bed, this isn’t the case for Rubin, who explains on her blog, “I’m sleepy. My mind wanders. I keep thinking of things I should do before I turn out the light, so I keep jumping out of bed. It just doesn’t seem like ‘real’ reading.”
Earlier this week, Rubin posted 12 tips for reading more on her blog. Among my favorites:
1. Quit reading. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started. No more. Life is short. There are too many wonderful books to read.
2. Read books you enjoy. When I’m reading a book I love—for example, I’m now reading A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book—I’m astonished by how much time I find to read during my day. Which is another reason to stop reading a book I don’t enjoy.
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6. Don’t fight my inclinations. Sometimes I feel like I should be reading one book when I actually feel like reading something entirely different. Now I let myself read what I want, because otherwise I end up reading much less.
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9. Choose my own books. Books make wonderful gifts – both to receive and to give – but I try not to let myself feel pressured to read a book just because someone has given it to me. I always give a gift book a try, but I no longer keep reading if I don’t want to.
Like Rubin, I often feel like I don’t read nearly as much as I want (or as much as I actually do). I used to blame this on location: That is, when I lived in Chicago and New York, I had built-in reading time on the train every day. Now that I work at home and have to drive everywhere, I have to carve out my own time to read. Often, it seems that I fail miserably at this: Part of the reason, I suspect, is that I do have a tendency to start reading the books given to me as gifts or books people recommend rather than sticking with what I want to read at that particular moment. Sometimes I waste time (and time that could be spent getting excited about a good book) by continuing to read a book that doesn’t really do it for me.
What about you? What keeps you from reading as much as you’d like? Or, alternatively, how do you make more time to read?
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Turn off the TV, music, computer. Get rid of as many noises and distractions as possible. Make sure anyone living with you (over the age of maybe five) understands you’re doing something you love and value when you are reading a book — and to leave you uninterrupted. How can anyone enjoy reading amid noise and chaos?
The hardest part is finding a book so good you can’t put it down or can’t wait to return to. Very few books are that compelling to me these days.
I agree with you on both accounts, Caitlin. Getting away from the laptop, the TV, and music certainly helps, but in the end, it’s largely about whether a book is completely irresistible. I’ve read two books that I couldn’t put down — Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Ann Hood’s Comfort — in the last couple of weeks, but the weeks before were filled with stumbling through some books that just didn’t do it for me. A good book makes all the difference — unfortunately, that also means you finish them so quickly that you’ve got to find something else to read.
I think it’s that evil ole Puritan Ethic (or maybe just a warped superego) that keeps me from reading for pleasure. Always I hear myself saying: I should be working, doing more charity work, cleaning, exercising, etc. However, I realize reading (learning, thinking, imagining) is the sustenance that drives it all, so the inner battles continue …
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