When I hit publish on my post about Eleanor & Park back in October, I wasn't expecting to walk away for six months.
I wasn't expecting a lot of things, really -- my reading habits rapidly declined as I focused on the certification tests that will shape my new career, and I didn't expect to spend November through February reading a 1500+ page technical textbook.
I didn't expect that reading would bounce right back to seeming impossible.
I didn't know that, in 2017, it would take me until March to finish a book.
Even now, I hesitate to say I'm back. I don't know that I am -- I've read two books in the past two weeks, which is a serious accomplishment given my previous pace of 1 book in 3 months, but I'm uncertain about my reading future.
I'm enjoying the book I'm reading right now, which is Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance. That doesn't mean I'll finish it. I have at least three books I can think of with bookmarks abandoned halfway through.
But I have some serious motivation, motivation I didn't feel even a month ago while on Spring Break: In six weeks, I will no longer be a teacher. I resigned a few weeks ago in anticipation of a job change meant to alleviate anxiety and give me more time to enjoy my life, and I'm happy about that.
It does, however, raise an interesting conundrum.
Over the past five years, people I work with have been recommending books to me. (This is no surprise, considering that I'm a Language Arts/English teacher.) Some of these recommendations have turned out to be shit, or filled with people "enjoying one another" as one over-enthusiastic colleague put it. Others are ones I genuinely want to read, when I get the time.
A few are coming from some of my best friends in the world, who just happen to be people I work with, and therein lies my problem, and my motivation: I want to finish these books.
I want to have the conversations that will happen as a result, even if my contribution is merely "WTF is happening in this story!" -- but in order to do that, I have to read them.
When reading is yet another source of anxiety, that task seems impossible.
I've been trying to re-claim this hobby I once loved. I read in snippets throughout my day, sometimes even while I'm standing in the hallway between classes. I try to read in the morning while I eat breakfast at my desk. My husband recently build us a hammock, so I've been sitting on the patio reading, sometimes for hours on end. It's been more relaxing than I thought, more than I ever remember feeling from my life before anxiety.
I hope it's working.
In an attempt to hang on to this motivation, and to hold myself accountable, here is the list of books I'd like to read before I resign:
1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
5. The Sandman (book 1 minimum) by Neil Gaiman
Honorable, if-I-have-time, Mentions go to:
1. American Gods, which I'd like to re-read before I watch the new show (April 30th)
2. Fragile Things, also by Neil Gaiman, most particularly the American Gods tie-in novella "The Monarch of the Glen"
... one of my friends is obviously a huge Gaiman fan. To be fair, so am I, or I wouldn't have set this bar for myself.
This averages out to more than a book per week before I'm done. That's a lot of reading, and I'm not positive I'll make it, not with all the grading I need to do and cooking/working out I need to do for my own peace of mind.
But I'm going to try.
A friend of mine with four small children tells me that he had a similar dilemma a few years ago: He wasn't reading enough, and he didn't like that. So he made a decision -- he would read in any free minutes he had. Waiting for kids at dance class? Read. Sitting down for five minutes when he got home? Read. Anytime, anywhere, he took advantage of the moments he had, and he read.
If you're a Stephen King fan, you'll note this is the same strategy the master himself recommends, and if both he AND one of my best friends swears by it, that's enough for me.
I just have to find the time that's lurking in my day. Scrolling through facebook mindlessly? Should be reading! Sitting at my desk at work dreading grading? Should be reading! Re-watching old episodes of Parks and Rec, even if they're hilarious? Should be reading!
There are no guarantees, I know that going in. I might get thirty pages into Brave New World and toss it out. I might suddenly develop a serious hatred of all things Gaiman, and cut the list in half. No matter what though, I'm going to try, and I'm going to push myself, and I'm not going stop reading.
I'm not going to give up what I will always maintain is the best hobby in the world.
