I’ll Never Read Them All

I’m feeling kind of sad this morning. A little down. You see, yesterday I went through my goodreads tbr and deleted the books I’m not particularly interested in anymore, as well as a hand full of duplicates. Now, my tbr is smaller than the average book blogger’s, only about 75, and yesterday I eliminated 10-15 books from it.

And as of today I have ADDED about 10 books.

Because new books are being written and published all the time. Books that sound fascinating and amazing! There are so many books that I want to read!

But I average about two books a month.

There’s no way I can keep up. No matter how many books I read, my list of books I want to read will always be getting longer and longer and longer because there are always more and more books. Which is wonderful! We are so lucky to live in an age where books are so readily and easily available and there is such a variety that we never have to worry about getting bored.

But I’m feeling sad. Because I realized.

I will never be able to read them all.

The Pros and Cons of Buddy-Reading

I bought myself Fuzzy Nation early this year, and I finally got the chance to pick it up this weekend. I got through the first two chapters and my husband saw me reading it.

“I wanted to read this one!” he said. (He can’t have wanted to read it that bad, it’d been sitting on my shelf for a few months, untouched.) “Do you mind if I read the first chapter? I’m kind of tired of Treasure Island.”

And so we embarked upon our third attempt at partner reading a book together.

The first book we read together was Ready Player One. It was so much fun to do! We both enjoyed it. As a pioneering work in what I’ve coined “nerd fiction” we had LOTS to talk about, and we were on vacation, so passing it back and forth was no big deal.

The second book we read together was His Majesty’s Dragon, one of my personal favorites. But while I finished it, my husband lost interest about halfway through. At the time I thought it was because almost no books keep him interested long enough to finish, but now I wonder if it wasn’t because we had to move through it so slowly. I would take it to work, read a chapter, bring it home, and pass it off to him to read that chapter the next day. Very slow going.

This third time, again, we didn’t finish together. In the first weekend of reading we made it about halfway through Fuzzy Nation, but then he forgot to take it to work with him, and I just went ahead and finished it. Ooops.

Do You Need a Breather Between Books?

Let me set the scene for you.

You’re on the last page of your book. As you finish you might sigh in happiness, or maybe you roll your eyes, but either way you close the book. And … then what?

Used to be I would take my book over to the bookshelf, put it in, and immediately pull out a new one and dive right in. Time permitting, of course. But lately I find that I need a bit of time to digest a book. Usually I won’t start reading a new one until the next day. Sleeping on it just feels … necessary. I don’t really know why, it’s not like I’m usually hung up on it, unable to stop thinking about it, or something like that. And I’m perfectly capable of writing a review after starting a new book. I just don’t feel like reading something new until I’ve slept.

Finding Time to Read

As a teen I often rolled my eyes whenever my mom talked about how busy she was. I had a lot going on in high school and often pulled 13+ hour days. And, yeah, my mom worked a lot, but I suspected it was because she was a work-o-holic, not because she HAD to.

But man, she was right. Something about adult life is just busier. A huge part of it is the commute. Yeah, kid me was working 13 hour days, but school was literally 5 minutes away. These days I commute an hour each direction. Part of it is cooking real food for dinner, which takes forever. The biggest part of it is having kids of my own who need me to take care of them. (Kind of looking forward to the teenage years when they don’t need help going potty!)

So, yeah, I’m busy. I have a hard time finding time for things that weren’t a big deal in high school. Things like hanging with friends, playing video games, watching TV.

Things like reading.

I know that for so many adults reading gets put on the back-burner. It’s time consuming and not as easy and mindless as Netflix. Even as passionate a reader as I am, I sometimes find it hard to make time for reading.

So here are some ways that I have found that work to squeeze reading into a busy schedule. 

Can You Read with the TV On?

It’s college football season, y’all!

We’re not big in to sports in my family, but we make time every Saturday to watch our alma mater play. I don’t know, it’s probably because we were in the marching band while we were in college, but we just feel so connected to our school and everyone we graduated with while we watch. And it’s so much fun! Especially when our team is doing well, like they are this year.

Now, obviously Saturday would normally be a day when I would want to catch up on my reading. So what’s up with that? Why am I being such a slacker?