To say that the plan is more of an aimless work in progress would be an understatement. True, three facets of it are starting to come together. I have a job that is paying the bills and gives me lots of free time to write and be productive and see my husband (though, to be frank, it’s mostly giving me lots of time to take afternoon naps and be perpetually sleepy). And our debt situation is slowly but surely turning around – the $4000 is down to about $3200, but more importantly we’re equaling the drop in debt with a rise in our savings account. The writing is starting to pick up again. I wrote around 25 pages over the span of a week, which is not a small amount. Then again, I haven’t even cracked my journal again since that outburst.
But what I want to talk about today is the reading part. The part of the plan that I can’t get my head around. I haven’t addressed it, because I haven’t figured it out yet. I am the girl who had books as the centerpieces at her wedding. We have three six-foot tall bookshelves with books behind other books, and I bought six wooden boxes at the liquidation sale to fill with more books that are now sitting under our bed. And yet I haven’t completed a full book in over two months.
I’ve kept track of the number of books I read over the past three years, and each year it clocks in right at around 35. It’s June 13, and I’ve read precisely four books in 2011. Sure, I could turn it around, throw in a Harry Potter reread or a bunch of mindless crap to pad the stats, but at this rate I’ll be lucky to crack ten books read for the year.
I’m overwhelmed. It’s ridiculous. I never realized how much I treasured that hour-long lunch break at Borders to read. The thirty-minute train rides to and from work every day. I walk to work now, where I have a half hour to sit at a desk and anxiously watch a camera to see if we’re getting slammed with customers (even if I know I can’t do anything about it, I can’t stop staring at it). And, in the process, I don’t read anymore.
That’s a lie. I do read. Just not books. Part of not working at a bookstore also means that I have suddenly subscribed to even more magazines that I did before. I used to read the New Yorker while packed in like the proverbial sardine on the train, then hit Entertainment Weekly on my lunch break. Now I have to fit them in at home. We get Esquire and Rolling Stone. I can only hope that Andrew reads them, because I sure as hell don’t. I have every issue of The Believer and I may have read a single issue in the past year and a half. I feel a sense of accomplishment when I get through a third of Vanity Fair each month. I dabble, when I am inherently someone that likes to read magazines from cover to cover. (Except for Entertainment Weekly – that one I have methodically read in the same way for as long as I can remember: back page, then thumb up to the reviews, then go to page one and work my way back. I still hate that they moved the Must List to earlier in the magazine, because it always used to lead off the reviews. But I digress.)
Oh, and did I mention? We get the Sunday New York Times now. To read that thing from cover to cover (which, believe it or not, I actually try to do) is like an entire 8-hour shift of work. The Book Review alone took me an hour this afternoon. GAH.
Then there are blogs and websites. The premiere of Grantland.com last week made me pretty much quake in horror at the idea that I would ever read a whole book again. In one day alone, it had articles by Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, Tom Bissell, and – oh, yeah – Dave freaking Eggers. I could spend the rest of my life reading nothing but websites, and while they might have serious journalistic qualities, that doesn’t give me the satisfaction of closing a book after finishing the last page.
So I ask of you: how do I turn it around? How do I make sense of all these options? Do I designate one day a week to magazines, one day (one would hope Sunday) to the newspaper, one day to catch up on Google Reader, with four days left over to read a book? Do I set aside my lunch break to do the Reader thing on my phone, leaving the afternoon for book and journalistic endeavors? Should I keep hoarding these New Yorkers, or should I just look through the table of contents the minute I open the mailbox and determine which articles I want to read?
I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown here. Too many options means that I just dabble, never finishing anything. So. Please. Light a fire under my ass. Give me your advice. Just, please, don’t make it too long. Because I’m 200 pages into a 750-page book and have this 4-inch tall stack of periodicals to get through from last week.
