Exhibit A: Unread Sunday Times
If I had an extra hour in every day, I know exactly how I’d spend it: working out.
Just kidding!! As if.
No, I’d spend it reading. No question.
Sometimes I think I should have been a librarian. Or a bookstore owner. Or a successful, bestselling author who gets to read when they’re not writing (or answering fan mail), instead of doing a day job. That would have been nice.
There was a time when I read more — namely, before I had children. But I have precious little time to do now. And stupid Clio’s cancer (the cancer being the stupid part; not her) has made it even harder.
I’m sort of in denial, though. I keep thinking that somehow I’m going to get around to reading everything I want to read.
Last March when I was at AWP, I signed up to get the Sunday New York Times. Partly because I wanted one of the free promotional items they were giving away at their table (I chose a coffee cup) but mostly because I really would like to have a life in which I spend a lazy Sunday morning drinking coffee and reading the paper.
Exhibit B: Depressing shelf of French and Spanish books. (And old Lonely Planet guidebooks. Sigh.)
But the reality is that maybe I manage to scan a few pages of the Magazine section while the girls are watching Ni Hao Kai Lan, and then I realize I have to go down to the basement to change the laundry over and when I come back up the girls are fighting over who’s taking up more room on the couch, and it all pretty much goes downhill from there.
The paper ends up sitting on a chair for a while (Exhibit A), as if we’re actually going to go back and read it later in the week, and eventually it ends up in the recycling bin, with a few sheets set aside to put down when the girls do art projects.
Meanwhile, we just renewed The New Yorker even though we (and mostly it’s Alastair) only read about 15% of the average issue. I don’t always even get around to all the cartoons anymore, which makes me sad.
I’ve saved all my old issues of Cook’s Illustrated (a magazine I adore, although I recently let my subscription expire) as if I’m going to go back and pore over and pluck recipes from them someday, when the reality is, I make the same meals out of the same 3 cookbooks over and over, and occasionally Google “easy not boring chicken recipe” or “fast lasagna.”
Exhibit C: Impressive, anxiety-inducing living room bookshelves.
And then there’s the sad little bookshelf in our bedroom (Exhibit B, above), where I’ve amassed Spanish and French books and textbooks over the years (I speak enough of both language to have a decent conversation with a five-year-old native speaker).
Some of them I actually used back in my twenties, when I did that thing I believe was called “traveling.” And every once in a while, I have a little burst of resolve and say to myself “I’m going to read something in Spanish or French once a week!” You can imaginez how that goes, amigos.
Finally, there are the bookshelves in our living room (Exhibit C), laden with books that we either have read (and have kept as if we’re going to re-read them) or plan to read — many of which we’ve had forever, but which we keep convincing ourselves, each time we do a purge, that, yeah, no, really, someday we’ll read that Booker Prize winner of 2002, or Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, or that biography of Gandhi I picked up out of a “free books” box on someone’s sidewalk back in 1998 and have toted around t0 4 subsequent addresses.
Of course, for a while when there was a free promo subscription to Entertainment Weekly showing up at our house for some reason, I somehow found the time to read it almost cover to cover. And somehow I always manage to find time to hang out on Facebook for a few minutes a couple of times a day.
But next month I’m going to read that Gandhi biography and drill myself on French verbs. I swear.
Oh god! The Lonely Planets! The non-English books. The ambitious classics! I know of what you speak/write/(don’t read). I will say I read every night before bed. Bit sometimes only a page. And in times of stress and/or difficulty I can’t concentrate on anything more challenging than the Hinger Games-level lit. But I refuse to believe I’ll never use the Lonely Planets (though they’ll need a serious updating). And someday I will — I WILL — get through the guilt stack on my nightstand (unless we get lucky and have a house fire.) Glad I’m not the only reader not reading enough.
I do have time to read now the boys are in school. I do that instead of cleaning. haha I am very similar in that I also love to read. I could spend all day long reading. Ever since I was a child. I don’t read intellectual stuff. Mostly popular fiction. You will have plenty of time to read one of these days once they are both in school full time. Just wait it out.
I’ve taken to binge reading on vacation in the summer where I plow through as many novels as possible in whatever time I’ve got. (Finished Eden Lake that way this year!) If I can slowly make my way through a book or two the rest of the year I feel lucky sometimes. The problem is to really enjoy a book you need real time to get lost in it. Reading in snips and bits is just not the same, but that’s what life with kids seems to become.
The day will come. It just took me reaching age 68. But now I have spent the last 6 weeks traveling, settled in a lovely stone cottage in the Yorkshire dales, then on to a converted Sausage shed at Warren Farm in Ireland. Besides walking and a bit of sightseeing, I spent my time mostly reading and writing. Long glorious days with 5 hours of writing, and the rest reading eating and drinking wine. So hang in there you only have a few decades and then you’ll be there too. Or maybe…just maybe, you’ll be smarter than I am and make the time now for your glorious aspiration
I keep thinking I will someday have time to read all the books and magazines that stack up around my house and occasionally I will purge and feel terrible that I have wasted those resources. The problem is that when you have 3-year-old magazines lying around your friends start thinking you are a loser, and I try to keep that fact from them as as long as possible.
I completely relate, and I’m a librarian. Canceled the subscription to the New Yorker a couple years ago because the back issues were piling up (I kept trying to recycle them unread, but then I’d feel compelled to quick flip through and make sure I wasn’t missing anything I really wanted to read … aaaaand back on the stack it would go.)
Love this post! I can relate to all of this…the lack of reading time, former life that involved traveling, and mostly the delusion that I really will get to read all the things I’ve put aside and try all the recipes I’ve clipped. Glad to know I am not alone. I do consider us lucky that we have loving families, lives and jobs that keep us from reading though…
I have a lot of parenting magazines stacked up around here. I do keep a couple in the car for when I get held up and I forgot my book.
I like staying with my mother at her house. The kids are so good there and my mom does all the cooking and cleaning so I can be lazy and I can read a lot. I always take like 3 books with me there. Plus I don’t have a tv in the guest room there so only thing I can do at night is read because my SD sleeps on the couch in the living room at night,
I lived in France 17 years ago, and still sport on my bookshelves French books that I lovingly paid to mail to my parents’ house to “keep up my French” when I returned to the US. Have I touched them in the intervening 17 years? NON! And I only have two cats, not two kids.
I also have been trying to reboot my Portuguese, which I was once fluent when I was about oh, three, but can barely utter a sentence. I still talk like a robot on valium.
I still manage to read a lot – but the stuff I do read, well, take a look at my Goodreads “To Read” queue, and it’s full of non fiction books about complex subjects and “literary fiction.” (God, can we have a whole other conversation about the phrases ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’?) Then, take a look at the list of books I’ve read this year, and it’s a giant pile of YA fiction, romance novels, and mysteries. Why? Because I can read one of those books in 2 days. I’ve been reading “A Visit From the Goon Squad” for almost 2 years (borrowed a friend’s advance copy, even), but I’ve read virtually everything by Cassandra Clare & Holly Black in that time. I have guilt over what I am reading, not how much. Which is, seriously, ridiculous. Talk about standards that nobody else cares about!
You will definitely have much more time to read when the girls are a bit older but in the meantime what about setting up a book group? Mine was set up eight years ago by a friend who was leaving our neighbourhood and wanted to keep in touch. We all had very young children then and now we’re all moving into the secondary school (junior high?) stage. In the meantime we have read 49 books! We meet around every six weeks in one of our houses, drink wine, eat cheese, talk about the book for about an hour or so and then move on to life the universe and everything (well ok, usually the children). We each take it turn to choose a book, and the rule is that the choice is final, no discussion. I’ve always been a reader but the book group has meant I’ve read all sorts of books I never would have picked up otherwise. One of the most fun moments is always when whoever’s turn it is reveals their pick at the end of the evening.
I know this doesn’t really solve the problem of not enough time but there’s nothing like a deadline…