Last week, I read two books: The Sun is Also a Star and The Amityville Horror.
The Sun is Also a Star was written in 2016 by Nicola Yoon. It is the story of Natasha and Daniel, two seventeen-year-olds living in New York who meet and fall in love.
The Amityville Horror was written in 1977 by Jay Anton. It is the (probably not) true story of George and Kathy Lutz, two thirty-somethings living in New York who move into the world’s most haunted house.
I mention them because these are the eighth and ninth books I’ve read so far this year. For some of you, that might not sound like a lot. For me, that’s a lot. According to my records, in 2016 I read nine books, total. Of those nine, seven were biographies. Of the nine I’ve read so far this year, only one has been a biography. Seven have been fiction.
The more I read the more I kick myself for not reading more, and not having read more. The list of books (especially classics) I want to read is growing. Most of what I’m reading right now is for school, but when May comes, I’ll have a fat queue waiting for me.
Thinking about all the time I spent not reading fills me with sadness. I hope I have enough time to catch up.
The only thing that surprises me is that coming from a line of avid readers, it took you so long to find the joy in it. But you lead such a full life of so many interests, there will never be enough to do it all. Just make sure you’re enjoying what you do and then life is good.
I read a lot as a kid because I had an unconditional love of reading. During my teenage years I read from 60 to 100 books a year. Once, when I was 31 years old, I read 132 books that year. That’s nearly 3 books a week!
Granted, many of those books were only 100-200 pages in length, which were typical for short story collections and novels written before the books like the massive novel Shogun came out (over 1,000 pages) and the mammoth tomes by Stephen King. However, if you look at the number of pages I read per year (yes, I kept track of that information) instead of the book count, my annual reading did not change much when I switched to the bigger books. I may have read less books per year but the number of pages stayed pretty consistent.
Sadly, in the past few years, my reading rate has gone down considerably: I’m lucky if I read half as many books and pages as I read 12 years ago. Mostly, that’s a time management thing. My love for reading hasn’t gone down any, I just devote less time to the effort. Last year I started changing that by going back to my old habits. It’s hard sometimes but I’m working on it because I love reading.
Think about what motivates you to read. If “love of reading” is not part of that motivation you may want to reevaluate your whole reading hobby/activity. Having reading as a chore is not a good thing as it sucks away that motivation. Reading books for classes in college sapped my motivation but I persevered and came up with new strategies. If a book I was reading for a class was demotivating me, I would cheat and read a quick Heinlein book or something from Arthur C. Clarke. Reading fun stuff helps out a lot when you have to read the less fun stuff.
It’s clear to me you love writing more than anything else. Sure reading suffers as a result but you love writing so much! You can’t feel guilty about not reading enough when your primary love is writing.
I started a driving job and get to listen to audio books all day long. Some say its not really reading, but the information is still going in so I beg to differ. Also I loved your Commodork book and really enjoy your podcasts so I wonder why you haven’t produced them as audio books. you could narrate them yourself and gain loads of new fans.
Anyway keep up the good work and I`ll keep listening as I drive through the English countryside making delivery’s.