Time to read?
“I’d love to read [insert book title here], but because [insert excuse here], I just never have the time anymore!”
If I’ve heard the above statement once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. I find myself wondering that if there were just a couple more hours in a day, we would have a flood of people rushing out to the nearest bookshop and buying that novel that they’ve always wanted to peruse. But then I tell myself to stop being so absurd as I realise that the ‘time to read’ debate has run out of steam and is about as hole-filled as a colander.
As I begin to get older and have a lot more things vying for my time, I find myself unable to devote as much time to reading as I once did. But that isn’t to say I’m completely void of ten minutes to half an hour a day in which to flick through a chapter or two of my latest purchase. I’m sure we’ve all been there. We get in from a difficult day, and in the spare few hours we get to ourselves, we want to simply sleep or do other things that require little to no thought. Most people in this situation attempt to read just before going to bed at night, but by that time they’re so tired that they can barely manage a couple of pages.
In the hectic hustle and bustle of today’s life – where instant gratification is king – reading is slowly slipping down the list of ‘things to do’, after going to the gym and playing computer games. It’s a shame really, and although many people have a book sat unopened by their bedside, how many nights a week is it actually read?
This isn’t to say that most people have genuine reasons for not finding the time or the desire to read for leisure in an evening. Students are forced to read things they don’t want to, office clerks spend all day looking at writing on a screen, the builder is simply too tired after a hard day and the politician only wants to look at the different newspapers to try to keep on top of everything. (Alright, so perhaps that last one is a stretch, but bear with me for now!).
But what about at other times during the day? If you don’t work from home or drive a car, there’s always time on the train or bus to open a book and read a chapter. There’s break times and lunch hours at work, not to mention those one or two days off per week. No matter how much you can protest otherwise, there will always be time to read, regardless of whether it’s ten minutes or an hour per day. This means that it must be that people simply no longer have the inclination to just stop being busy, sit down, and enjoy a good book.
So, in the space of a few short paragraphs we’ve managed to cut away at some of the myth surrounding the reasons why reading is not usually on a ‘Top 5’ list of hobbies. The real problem that we have now (and will conveniently be spoken about in a future article) is figuring out just why it is that excuses about time are made instead of actual admittance about why books just aren’t in vogue any more.
Maybe if we all just took the time to sit down and allow the few minutes to be sucked into an engaging piece of literature, we would all be a lot calmer and relaxed.
How true your article is, especially in these overly busy times. I will admit though to being one of the *Before Bed Time* readers. My husband and I both greatly enjoy taking that time at the end of our day, to relax with a good book before turning out the lights. I think we all make time for things we really enjoy and hopefully more people will realize how informative and entertaining reading can still be…and make the time for it in their buy lives.
Congratulations on the new site, and can’t wait to read all the interesting articles, now and in the future.
I bookmarked this blog. Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website
[...] thus far in my previous article, we touched upon the topic of people not reading because they have no time to do so. We also [...]