Apparently, our identity is largely formed in our late teens – our accent at that time sticks, the bands we listen to resonate for the rest of our lives, and for me, deeply moved and awakened by books, my identity was “avid reader”. I read widely and voraciously, with several books on the go, as a guest I would gravitate towards my hosts’ bookshelves, I would stay up all night to finish a book, and I would escape from extended family get-togethers with a book into my grandparents’ ocean scented old caravan they had parked out the back. Books offered me insight, ideas and inspiration, and meant I always had something to look forward to. When I was 17, in my first year of university, I bought a boxed set of 60 Penguin Classics, extracts from the likes of Tolstoy, Balzac and Plato– I expected I would read them all that year and they would be a stepping stone into more and more books for the rest of my life.
Instead, years of working intensely on complex contracts and legal opinions for long hours left me with little appetite for more words at the end of each day. Then babies arrived and my attention span was left tattered across night feeds, Curious George and play dough. The final blow was the advent of “smart” phones. And this combined to create a two horned dilemma – to find time to read became a hard won battle against an insistent list of to-dos and attending to the needs of those around me, so I did not want to “waste” my reading time on anything frivolous. But a degraded attention span made it hard to read anything that wasn’t frivolous. I bounced with exasperation between George Elliot and Maeve Binchy, reading neither. A low point came when a podcast breezily suggested “maybe you haven’t read your favourite book yet” and I knew that wasn’t true for me – no book would resonate as much as those I had read during the emotional intensity of youth. Nearly thirty years later and the 60 small books have hardly been touched.
But despite all this, my identity still valiantly claimed that I was at my core a reader. And over the last few years, I have found myself very slowly recovering some reading momentum, in parallel with recovering from burn out. These are the things that have helped me:
- Reading young adult and children’s classics – books like The Secret Garden and Ender’s Game strike the right balance for me of a high quality read without being too taxing;
- Audio books – I’ve just finished listening to Contact by Carl Sagan and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Both are somewhat slow paced and I don’t think I would have had the patience to sit and read them, but their pace suited having them on in the background while I pottered in the studio, dipping my attention in and out of them;
- A designated spot to read – I don’t only read in one place, but I have one place that I only read in. No scrolling or Netflix allowed! An old arm chair of my grandmother’s which I have put by a sunny spot in the bedroom.
- I don’t have to finish every book I start but I have to finish some. At times, my path has been littered by barely started books until I’m compulsively lurching from first chapter to first chapter. So although I don’t force myself to finish a blatantly unreadable book, I do try to finish about one quarter of the books I start. I’m currently persevering with Children of Men by PD James despite finding it a sombre read.
- Sorting my bookshelves – the annual local book fair is a good incentive to sort through my bookshelves and I recently sorted them into fiction, non-fiction, poetry, philosophical & spiritual, art books, and old hardcovered classics that I have sheepishly organized by colour because I like how it looks.
- Wearing headphones in the living room. I like being around my family, and they like watching sport and videos about how to slow barbecue. I wear headphones now to tune out the noise so that I can read companiably alongside them on a Sunday afternoon while we share a fruit crumble in front of the fire.
- A book subscription – Emily at Woodside Books in Oxford runs a small second-hand bookshop and offers a book subscription. In our family, I buy all the Christmas presents including my own, so for my present I signed up for 6 months, filled in a questionnaire about my book preferences, and she sent me a hand-picked book each month. It was lovely to open the mailbox and find a brown paper package filled with a mysterious book, and I highly recommend.
- Not thinking about other books while I read. About every 3 months I go for a jog, and while I’m jogging, I get enthused and think about all the regular jogging I’m going to do, and how I will then incorporate bike riding, and train for events and by the time the jog is finished I’m completely overwhelmed by my aspirations. The same happens when I read, until the book I am reading seems feebly inadequate compared to the Herculean plan I’ve devised to read a thousand books in a year. So I now try to just be present with the book I am reading.
- The biggest change has come from recently resolving that I would read every single day. Turning reading into a requirement for the day has not leached the enjoyment, but instead it has taken off the pressure to read an important book, or for a long time, or with great earnestness. As long as I read any book for five minutes, I can tick the day off, and it has made me feel both more relaxed and accomplished about reading. Maybe I’ll get to the boxed classics one day, but for now, I was delighted to find myself spending a whole holiday day reading a Michael Crichton courtroom thriller from beginning to end. It seems that I am a reader after all!
Soon-Lee Spicer - Artist 