Met with various friends over the holiday weekend, and one asked what I read.
Given how much Dan and I like our books, I found it quite hard to answer, and having been mulling this one over since.
Part of the issue comes from the fact that we have different reading habits at different times. I read loads, for years – pretty much anything I could lay my hands on, but certainly lots of fiction.
By A Level time, with 3 different subjects all with set texts, I was starting to burn out on improving fare. I would revise for a chunk of time, then go off and read Arthur Hailey novels for something completely unrelated.
Getting into the world of work, I’d love to say that I am working my way through a list of grand novels, but it just isn’t happening.
Partly, the time over for private reading is short; less suited to the kind of indulgent read-for-hours stuff that I used to do. Partly also, the number of other things I have to read has gone up – with around 700 students to look after a year, and those connected with them, there’s an awful lot of emails to keep up with.
So now I read short stuff – and lots of that, with luck. Articles in the daily paper supplements over break time and lunch. Saturday paper – again, more the comment than the news. A chapter a day of the Bible, on the bus into work.
Hopefully some time for reading before bed – a bit of a return to science fiction at the moment, lots of classic Asimov. Sometimes Dan and I have a phase of reading to each other at night – quite good for Harry Potter and the like.
Holidays are the points where it can be possible to read more. When we were away last autumn, it got quite close to meaty stuff: I, Claudius (we were visiting Rome), and some travel writing.
Work trips are possibles for reading – particularly train journeys or hanging around airports. Worked through another couple of the Thursday Next books on my Germany-Austria trip last year – interesting, but also funny, which is a plus when you want some distraction.
Every now and then, something around counselling/work-life balance etc is good – a point where your brain is clogged up and some reflection can be helpful. (Having finished the counselling course recently, though, it’s quite nice not to have to read anything ‘official’.)
Children’s books are also favoured ways of switching off, as are cook books. I don’t go as far as having a copy of the cook book for the kitchen and one for the bedroom – but there is something very comforting about reading cook books. More a winter pastime, probably.
Then there’s the internet – again more at work, but I end up researching quite a varied range of subjects in the line of publications activities. Occasional forays onto wikipedia to find out more about something.
Did you know that there are around 3.5 million speakers of Lithuanian? One of my colleagues could have looked it up himself, but I think he’s decided it’s more fun to make me find out instead.
So that’s probably quite a lot. Dan and I seem to have swapped places – he spent his school years reading more non-fiction than fiction, with me clearly focused on fiction.
Since then, I still love stories, narratives, descriptions, but I find myself more and more interested in the world too; a closet social scientist, looking at trends, movements, shifts in public opinion.
Probably we all still read for the main things we used to read for: excitement, relaxation, expanding our horizons. We just find that we can get the same things from sources we might not have looked at before.
Words are still my original drug. And thankfully, you can indulge in them with a cup of caffeine in the other hand.