Sometimes life gets in the way. Getting through college, raising a family, and the pressure of everyday problems kept my nose to the grindstone for several years.
One day, after deciding to move on from my current job, I pulled out my resume to dust it off. You know the drill, give it some spit and polish. I had a section at the bottom headed Hobbies. While glancing through the list, my eyes stopped at ‘reading’. Yes, I loved to read. Fantasy, thriller, and historical fiction are just a few genres I’ve dived into. But the strange thing was, I couldn’t remember the last time I picked up a book to read for pleasure.
Why had I let reading lapse into non-existence? Circle back to life getting in the way. There always seemed to be something more important, someone else that needed something from me. For the few moments of ‘me’ time sprinkled throughout the past decade, I sat in front of the television. Not that I’m slamming television. There are some quality shows out there. But why television and not a book? This question drifted away unanswered until just after Christmas.
My youngest daughter, Gwen, said she’d joined a Reddit reading group. They were taking the entire next year to read War and Peace, one chapter per day. After applauding her choice, my earlier question about why I hadn’t picked up a book for years crossed my mind, as well as an answer. I enjoyed snuggling up for hours in a chair with a book, a blanket, and hot chocolate. A luxury which is now a distant memory. What if I took the same approach as this reading group? One chapter a day. I could fit that in, right?
I had her direct me to the group, and I signed up. Together we searched Amazon for the book version the group used. Come January 1st, I was ready to go.
The first couple of weeks I had to set phone reminders to motivate me. I experimented with different times of the day. I had read, to make things a habit, you do them after something that is already an engrained habit, like brushing your teeth. If your brain connects these activities together, the second one becomes a habit. I settled on reading right after my shower in the morning. An bonus was my hair got a few more minutes to dry before wrestling it up into a ponytail. My hair is thick and curly, hair dryers were abandoned in my teens.
I drifted away from the Reddit discussions after the second month, but stuck to the chapter-a-day schedule like my life depended on it. Well, my reading life did. I’d say six weeks in I settled into a nice routine. Some chapters were short, tempting me to read another. But I stuck to the plan, just one per day. On a day the chapter word count was short, I opened my Kindle library. It was full of free Prime books I selected each month but never got around to reading. I downloaded one and read the first chapter.
From then on, I read one chapter from each book every morning. When time was short, War and Peace won out over the other book. A commitment is a commitment. My hunger for story increased. I checked audible for fiction books. My commute to work is roughly thirty minutes. I enjoy listening to audio books rather than the radio. These books had always been non-fiction, help yourself, how to be a better manager, type of books. I had decided to switch to fiction.
I found the Reckoners Series by Brandon Sanderson. My life changed. I was hooked, both on listening to stories during my commute and Brandon Sanderson. Now I had three stories I enjoyed every day. You’d think they would get mixed up in my mind, but they didn’t. All the fictional worlds stayed neatly in their own pockets of my mind.
Regarding War and Peace, yes, I finished the book. I read the last chapter sometime during the final two weeks of the year. I do recommend the book. As with older classics, the exposition was, at times, hard to get through. Also, footnotes and foreign language translations were at the end of the chapters. This was a bit of a struggle for me on my Kindle. I admit to wishing for War and Peace book 2. These characters were my friends; I interacted with them every day for a year. What was I going to do?
I started a new adventure of reading classic novels. I moved straight into Les Miserables, then Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights: the list goes on. To this day, I continue the tradition of one classic book, one more recently published fiction book, and one fiction audio book.
I’m grateful to my daughter and War and Peace for helping me find my way back to the wonderful world of books.
