Tuesday, January 30, 2018

The Reading Knack Slipping Away. How to stop it.

I feel the reading knack slipping away.  I want to reclaim it.  What is the problem?  What is the solution?

My favorite spot at home is on the sofa in the den, stage-left.  It is very comfortable. A lamp on the end table provides good light.  I can see directly into the kitchen, where very often Carol is working, and she is an attention-drawing presence (and always has been), easy to look at.  Her mere presence draws my attention away from my book.  Divorce is probably not the answer.  In fact, every man should have my problem, whether he is a reader or not.

To my right, as I sit on the sofa, the TV is almost immediately adjacent.  Although it looks across my point of view, its screen is very easy to see.  And there are a set of controllers within my reach, giving access to a cornucopia of fast-food for the brain, largely junk.  Either throw a brick through the screen or find another comfortable place to read.  Maybe in the kitchen.

A very large number of books waits for me.  They are in several places in our house, where they wait, but especially on the shelves of a sort of home office.  When I am in that room with the bookshelves, I find myself,  like the jackass who died of hunger, as he stood between two stacks of hay, not being able to make up my mind about what to read.  What we need here is a list.

There must be a reading muscle.  Like any muscle.  My endurance flags when I pick up a book.  I'm not a tough enough reader.  I see a new idea or a new word as I read.  My mind slips away from the book as I think about that idea or go look up the word in the dictionary.  Within limits, that's probably a good thing.  But most of the time,  for crying out loud, make a note on a note pad and keep reading.  And then go back to those notes.

Read no more than, say, three books at a time.  Not ten.

Always have a book that you are reading that is very challenging.  Commit X number of minutes to it each day. For that matter, when you sit down with any book, easy or hard, decide how long you are going to read, and then hang in there.

Ride MetroRail to work, not the car.  Yes, it takes longer, but you can spend the time reading, unless some idiot sits next to you and starts jabbering on his cell phone.  (Do not take weapons on MetroRail if you are a reader.)

Start a blog, so you can tell people what you are reading and what you think of it.  Or maybe you don't suffer from "show and tell" disease.  That showed up in me in first grade.  Never left. 

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