Serious Reader

 

If you are going to be a serious reader, you have to set aside time for it. 

Grab at least 10 or 15 minutes in the morning and afternoon and then a good 40 to 50 minutes in the evening. If you can get more, go for it, but recognize that life will throw distractions your way and you'll have to work around them. 

You don't have to finish everything you start, and you don't need to restrict your reading to the classics. At the same time, however, classics are classics for a reason. It is a real omission to go through life without having read "A Tale of Two Cities" or "The Grapes of Wrath." Or, yes, "War and Peace."

And there are plenty of great magazines out there.

Don't read quickly. Savor the words. Looking at what the author is doing is nice but that's a distant second to losing yourself in the story. Enjoyment can be lost if there is too much analysis, particularly when reading fiction. [I am a margin-scrawler when reading non-fiction.]

Earlier today, I thought of some books I should re-read. My short list is the following:

• "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
• "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell
• "The Last Hurrah" by Edwin O'Connor
• "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
• "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens
• "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker
• "The First Circle" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• "Parties and Politics in America" by Clinton Rossiter
• "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom

There are many more, of course. 

Confession: I need to set aside more time to read.

[Photo by Tom Hermans at Unsplash]