Talking to my friend Marina last week, I confessed to her that just an hour before I had checked out a staggering 13 books from the library. I had rushed out after an exam to return a few and then schlep the new load back to my dorm room in a Trader Joe’s bag. They were piled up requests, some of which I had forgotten I requested, all various sizes and styles, and now they were lovingly stacked alongside some of the other books I had checked out from the library before.
My friend asked where I found time to actually read all those books, and I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said “eh.” It was a diffident answer (and I apologize, Marina) but it was really the only one I could prop up at the time because it was a question I was hitherto unable to really register. How did I find time to read all those books?
Now, I will say to all interested parties, I don’t shrug off school to read for pleasure. I never have. I do all my homework, go to lecture, go to discussion and take my exams. I will say that I have never let school keep me from reading for fun, precisely because it is my fun.
I imagine there is an unbroken chain of reading that stretches back to high school, an errant chain of fiction and science writing and just general random content. I read so much that I kept a list of it (pre-Goodreads) all during junior and senior year of high school, which I would say was the most pretentious thing I ever did in high school.
And don’t get me started on the dreams. I have dreamed several times that I was reading a book. Just turning the pages, an ineluctable commentary on my life. They were good dreams. Even my favorite dream was literary tinged: I dreamt I was at a concert watching Madness perform “Our House.” Only it wasn’t Madness; it was James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw (all Irish) performing it, complete with an intricate line dance. And let me tell you, they rocked it.
I’m a bit conscious of putting on a persona in these columns, and it’s pretty clear just looking at that last paragraph before the dream one that there is no comfortable way of saying you’re obsessed with something. None, at any rate, that makes your audience feel as comfortable as you do. Even love needs a bit of tempering if it’s really going to work.
And my love, this love, is tempered. As much as I would like to, there is no way I could read all day, book stacks to the contrary. Besides the obvious likelihood of physical burnout, my responsibilities towards school, the general need for friendly human interaction and the passing of days keeps me from that sort of self-destruction. I’ve begun to suspect I enjoy writing these columns because they lets me depressurize all the words effervescing in my head day to day just as much because it’s for such a stellar newspaper—though both reasons are equal.
So in answer to, “how do I find time to read?” it’s pretty intuitive. If I have free time that isn’t otherwise budgeted, I read. If I’ve got a full night of homework on my plate, I take shifts and use reading as a break from regular work. And I also recognize that if I run out of time to read something, I can always set it down and come back later, or return it. And those rules, dear reader, apply just as well to you with regards to reading. Or anything you’re interested in, really.
But the how isn’t that interesting is it? Why is much more interesting, and less esoteric than how. Because why can apply to more than one man’s passion with reading.
I hope I’m not coming off as cloying by saying all this, but I would call reading one of my passions (along with these burgeoning attempts at writing). I would say as a general rule that passion is a thing you ought to have, or find. And I would say as a rule that you should avoid morassy platitudes such as “do what you love” when talking about passion because such a statement doesn’t evoke thought and doesn’t have much staying power beyond a cheap double entendre. Find the niches in your life for it. Be patient with it. Don’t let it kill you. But don’t kill it, either.
Have questions or input for Sean’s suddenly self-help column? Email him at sreichard@wisc.edu.
