Soon the New Year will be upon us, a chance for new beginnings and, perhaps more often than not, failed resolutions. But this year forget the promise to jazzercise yourself into a size three, find a job working with parakeets-in-need, or get noticed for all the wrong reasons on reality television, and think instead of what you can be doing to read more, to read better, and to read differently in the coming year.
In the first part of this essay I’ll be looking at ways to get more reading done around our busy schedules. In the second I’ll discuss improving the quality of one’s reading, and show how important identifying our personal reading goals is to getting the most out of the time we do have. In the final section I want to look at strategies for challenging ourselves to always stay fresh and enthusiastic about our reading, and to read outside our comfort zone.
Keep A List
The first step in getting serious about reading is keeping a list. You may be surprised how the simple act of recording the books you’ve read acts as a spur to reading more, but putting pen to paper creates a psychological shift that elevates reading into the ranks of personal finances, dear diaries, and little black books. Reading becomes serious, worth keeping track of, something recorded as part of the permanent record of who you are and what you have accomplished.
I’ve been keeping a list for over a decade, and in that time my reading has sped up and become more focused, and I find it easier to engage in reading projects and challenges that have me reading multiple books on a subject over a specific period of time. A look at the number of books on your list at the end of a year gives you a guideline as to what you can expect to be able to read in the average year, and also the nature of the sorts of books you tend to read.
That yearly number also creates an explicit challenge — the challenge to continually try to outdo yourself by getting more reading done.
Reading As Priority
There are only so many hours in the day. Yet, over the course of the equivalent amount of time, some people successfully juggle career, hobbies, family, and intellectual and creative endeavors, while others manage to beat Grand Theft Auto IV. Again. Not that there is anything wrong with the kind of frivolous pursuits that, at the end of the day, might just keep some of us sane, but a person’s priorities in life are the foundation for everything they accomplish. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking you’d like to read more — and I’m assuming many or most of the readers of a book review blog at times think exactly that — then you have to deliberately and consciously make the choice to view reading as one of life’s priorities.
Not that it can or should ever be your top priority. School, work, family, friends — these things naturally come first. But what of every evening spent in front of the television with the spouse? What of two or three nights a week out with the guys? What of commitments at work over and above what is required? Cutting back on these sorts of things, even just for a few hours a week, will pay dividends when it comes to getting extra reading in. Again, it boils down to priorities — what are you willing to sacrifice? How much can you get away with?
One of the biggest limiting factors of the pursuit of reading is its essentially solitary nature — to the unsympathetic, it seems practically antisocial. The ideal situation, of course, is to have a spouse or significant other that shares your passion and will be quite content to either leave you to your ‘thing,’ or crack the spine on a book of their own and join you. Failing that, the ability to concentrate on a book in the midst of TV, phone conversations, or gabbling offspring will prove an invaluable trait (alas, it is one I myself do not possess).
Stealing Time
Assuming there are not large chunks of time in your day that can simply be converted from one abandonable pursuit into quality reading time, those who want to ramp up their reading need to find ways to steal enough minutes in the day to add up to something significant over time. Thinking about those stolen moments ahead of time and planning for them by making sure you have a book, ereader, or mp3 player loaded with an audio book on hand when they arise is a great way to squeeze in a few extra books a year.
I’m often amazed that, when sitting in a waiting room, cafeteria, airplane, or similar ‘dead time’ zone, I’m one of the few people holding a book. Or the only one. Of course, this has a lot to do with the dwindling number of readers in the world, but I also suspect many of my fellow time-killers aren’t averse to the reading of a good book — they just didn’t plan ahead and bring one. While a bit of contemplative time to roam one’s head-space is a nice thing, waiting rooms and airplanes are hardly the ideal place. Better to bring a book, get some reading done, and get your mind off the impending root canal or possibility of catastrophic engine failure at 30,000 feet.
(And do not be afraid to turn off the horrible television sets blaring 1984-like from the corners of these waiting rooms. Just as you may have hesitated to saunter over and do so out of fear of confrontation, so will the others in the room likely fear to call you out for doing so. Remember — readers have the right-of-way and the moral high ground in these situations . . . although it also helps to look crazy and/or surly when doing this. Of course, you could probably just ask nicely instead.)
One tremendous bit of temporal vampirism many of us experience on a daily basis is the commute to work. This unpaid exercise in repetitive navigation can add up to a significant portion of a person’s life. While music and talk radio can help pass the time, throwing some audio books in the mix is a great way to cover some of those books you just can’t quite get to over the course of a year. While I much prefer reading to being read to, audio books are a great hand’s free option for those of us unfortunately stuck behind a wheel every day.
Getting more reading done requires focus, deliberate planning, and a bit of obsessive behavior to wrangle those precious minutes out of your schedule. But excessive enthusiasm for quantity can also prove to be a detriment to the quality of your reading — something I’ll talk about in the next part of this essay.
BILL WARD is a regular contributor to blogs such as BlackGate.com and Flash Fiction Chronicles. He is the review editor for Black Gate Magazine, and his own work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as science fiction and fantasy tabletop game publications. He maintains a blog on all things genre at www.billwardwriter.com
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“Not that it can or should ever be your top priority. School, work, family, friends — these things naturally come first.”
I find that as I get older (I’m in my mid-60s) reading moves higher on the priority list. I love books, and I have a lot of them. There is only so much time left to me, and that number is unknown but necessarily dwindling with each passing day.
Knowing I have more unread books in the house than I will likely have time to read at my current pace of 80-90 books a year makes me look very hard for ways to increase reading time and decrease time spent doing a great many other things – such as watching television.
I agree Richard, being surrounded by unread books is a great motivator!
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