Thursday, April 9, 2015

Reading... and other victims of my lost attention span

I used to be a voracious reader. I have been reading novels since I picked up my first Bobbsey Twin Mystery in first grade. Oh, the Bobbsey Twins. Four kids: the two older kids with brown hair, the two younger ones with blonde hair. It was my family. If only I could convince my younger siblings to solve mysteries with me.  In Middle School, I was reading a book a day, sometimes more. I couldn't get enough.  As an adult, I pummeled through everything Oprah could recommend as well as my own novel choices. I usually had a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction going at the same time--to say nothing of my stacks of magazines. I always had a tote bag with me, which, in addition to my books and magazines, held a homemade journal so I could take notes--mainly on the non-fiction books. Even when the kids were little, I found time to read. At work on lunch breaks or while waiting in the car to pick them up from their activities. Maren was always the last child to emerge.

I don't read in bed as I did as a child and teenager. Mark isn't a reader, and he is early to bed, so I got out of the habit-- except when he went on business trips. Then, reading in bed, for as late as I wanted, became my big indulgence. Oh, yeah. Things get wild when Mark isn't around. But he hasn't taken a business trip in years.

What happened to me? Keri says that she could never read in our house, which she owned before we bought it. Too dark? I try not to let her personal idiosyncrasies of place influence my ideas of this house. Try being the operative word. While it might be true that this house isn't particularly conducive to reading, I don't think that is the issue. I have been having trouble getting into the swing of a good book for years now. A strong correlative may be the appearance of the iPhone in my life. I'm still reading, just in little snippets of Facebook posts, Tweets, the first couple paragraphs of an article that leads me further down a rabbit hole to other articles I did not intend on reading. Not long after we got our iPhones, I got an iPad. I love books, but as I always liked to carry several, I figured it would be more convenient to have them all in one device, rather than a heavy tote bag. I even started buying purses so they would fit my iPad. Plus, I didn't have to dust an ebook--or pack it in a box to move it across state lines.

I don't know. Was it the fact that an iPad isn't as personal as a book? That an iPad doesn't smell as good as the perfume of ink on wood pulp? It doesn't feel as sueded as the pages between my fingers. You can't read with it in the bathtub or floating on a raft in my sister's pool or in certain outdoor conditions. In addition, my eyesight has waned, and I didn't realize it at first. On the iPad, you can always make your print bigger. It was only when I switched back to an actual bound book that I realized that I couldn't see the print any more. Having to grab readers when you want to read is a deterrent. I own several pairs, and I still can't find them.

I also used to go through more audio books before I moved here. I would take long solo walks for exercise, and I took the audio books with me to pass the miles. Also, I drove my car more. As a sub, my schools were, on average, a half hour away, as was most of the shopping I had to do. I could listen in the car and make my commutes pass quickly. In Arden, I am more apt to walk with someone than alone. And stores are conveniently located to within ten minutes of our house.

I am getting through some books. The process is just so painfully slow. I have started mediating now for twenty minute increments. I know I need to also work reading time back into my daily routine. I need to back off of Facebook and all its immediate satisfaction. Maybe give up the binging on TV shows I missed the first time around, or at least give myself a break between series. It really is the new way to watch television. Oh so addictive.

I wonder if I am alone in this affliction or if others are suffering with me. This is one instance in which I think that the doing things the Arden way and joining a club isn't going to help me. A book group would just make me feel bad about my inability to read a book cover to cover within the very doable timeline of a month. And the book in question would more than likely not be one that I chose. For now, I must take my latest read back to the Arden library. I have had for too long and haven't finished it. They are having an amnesty on fines this week, so off it must go. And I must apologize to my friend, Andy, for not finishing his first novel effort that he asked me to read and review. It's not you, it's me. 

When people come up to me and apologize because they haven't read my book, I laugh. No apology necessary. I know. I hope modern society doesn't turn us all into non-readers or readers who only read 140 characters at a time. I have one great hope in my son. He is both an insatiable reader and someone who loves video games. If he can create the space to exist this dualism, I think I have a shot as both a reader and as someone who wants to write novels for a living. For the reading part, I just need to remind myself of the joy I used to get from all those words...once upon a time.

1 comment:

  1. You read the Bobbsey Twins in first grade? My first one - other than children's
    books - was Black Beauty. How I loved that book - and cried when poor Ginger died. It was Christmas vacation and I was 7 years old and stuck in bed with the measles. Already reading was a favorite pastime and Black Beauty began my lifelong love of reading. (It was all the more intense because I was always sick on birthdays and holidays - chicken pox for my birthday one year and mumps the next, stuck in bed with my only escape my book.) Anyway, most of my friends were reading the Bobbsey Twins and later Nancy Drew while I was whinnying and galloping around the neighborhood and reading horse books. My favorite author was Walter Farley, who wrote the Black Stallion series as well as the Flame series, but any book about horses was it for me. I remember sitting in a tree by the Sassafras River reading Mary O'Hara's Thunderhead while my mom and dad and brother fished nearby. I loved Annette Funicello because she starred in The Horsemasters, which I had already read. The Red Road Pony, Smoky a Cowhorse, Beyond Rope and Fence, Comanche of the Seventh, King of the Wind...if it was about horses, I read it, fiction, non-fiction, biography. My all-time favorite series was The Silver Brumby series, written my an Australian woman, Elyne Mitchell. I wanted to be her daughter and have a brumby of my own and ride the Australian Alps with her. (In fact my current bedtime reading is her biography, written by her daughter and filled with great photos.) By the time I was 9 or 10 I had branched out to dog books like The Call of the Wild, Outlaw Red, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin. Of course, back then the TV had only 3 channels unblock and white. The records we listened to were my mom's 78's from the 1940's. We played outside a lot. There was not the competition with media the kids have nowadays. When I couldn't go out to play my books were my best friends, my escape, my lifeline to travel and imagination. Six decades later it is the same. Books.

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