2

Finding More Time to Read as an Adult

by ​Rebecca Ripperton

​January ​7, 2019

As I’ve grown older, finding time to read independently as an adult has become progressively more difficult. This is due in part to an increase in responsibilities and time commitments, but it is also due to my own habits and attitude toward reading. Now that I’m no longer reading my way through the Western Canon for school, or reading as preparation for teaching English classes, I often find myself feeling guilty over the time I do spend curled up with a good book. At some unidentifiable point in time, I mistakenly began to think of reading as an indulgence, rather than a necessity.

But reading is just as important for adults as it is for children, regardless of our other obligations. It may not be something we are required to do each day, but that doesn’t mean we can’t – and shouldn’t – treat it as such. And the rewards of reading are endless: it educates us, kindles our imaginations, enables us to experience more expansive thought, requires us to engage in serious self-reflection, inspires us to strive for excellence, and serves as a continual reminder that there is more to the world that what is immediately before us. In short, it is both magical and life changing.

So, without further ado, here are our suggestions for finding (i.e. carving out) time to read as an adult.

1. Listen to books, in addition to reading them

Audiobooks can be a wonderful resource. While not a replacement for reading books, they are certainly worth exploring as a complement to your other reading practices. To give you some ideas, I enjoy listening to audiobooks when I’m walking to campus or downtown to the library, and while I’m doing household chores like cooking, folding laundry, washing the dishes, etc. They are ideal for times when whatever I’m doing is completely incompatible with reading but I still want something to occupy my mind.

Depending on the length, I’ve found that I can usually get through an audiobook every one to three weeks this way. The key seems to be selecting books that have excellent narrators and are, by nature, highly engaging. I also tend to prefer listening to authors whose language is more concise but reading books by authors who utilize more complex language. AudibleLibriVox, and Internet Archive are just a few of the many great programs available for audiobooks.

2. Write a "to read" list every day

If you are someone who likes to keep a “to do” list for each day, write down your reading “assignment” the night before. This is a good way to start shifting your mindset from thinking of reading as an activity you get to do only if you have extra time to thinking of it as something that you need to do nearly every day, regardless of circumstance.

If it helps, you can even treat reading like a chore – not in the sense that it is onerous, but in the sense that it something that you need to keep up with on a regular basis. Keeping your goal easily attainable is also helpful, so I’ll often write down “Read 10 pages of ______” on my to do list, knowing full well that once I start reading, I’ll likely keep going.

3. Keep a book in your car

Instead of spending that unexpected 5 to 10 minutes of waiting time on your phone, read your book instead!

4. Don’t feel obligated to read something just because it was a gift

Most of us have received at least one book that we are not even vaguely interested in from someone who knows how much we love to read. Although you may feel obliged to, you do not need to read these books! Your reading time is too precious to waste on a book you don’t find valuable, especially if the attempt will cause you to procrastinate from reading or even avoid the activity altogether.

Alternatively, if the book is one you do intend to read, you don’t need to do so immediately. When I receive a book as a gift I’ll often say something along the lines of “thank you so much, I can’t wait to read this someday. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to it this winter, but I will certainly short-list it for the future.” Then, when you get around to reading the book, be sure to let that person know so you can talk about it together!

5. Read multiple books at a time

This can be helpful in maintaining your enthusiasm for reading and your reading momentum, especially because there are likely books that you want to read but not read every day, or books that you don’t want to read more than a few pages of at a time. When I have 3 or 4 books going at a time, the odds that I can’t wait to keep reading at least one of them at any given time are much higher than the odds with just one.

6. Take advantage of tablets

For a long time I was a book purist and resisted the digital book trend.  I’m not sure what I thought would happen if I read a digital edition of a book, but I just wasn’t into it. Eventually my mom got me a Kindle for Christmas and I immediately fell in love with it. It’s the perfect size for traveling, and I’ve even taken it on numerous backpacking trips since it doesn’t require a flashlight or headlamp to use. It’s also ideal for times when you want to turn the light on to read but your significant other is still sleeping. (The one I have is now 5 years old and apparently indestructible. Doing anything in the Kindle store requires significant patience, but once a book is downloaded, the actual reading function works smoothly and the battery lasts for weeks, even in cold weather.)

7. Borrow books from a digital library

If you do have access to a tablet or smartphone for reading, be sure to take advantage of your local library’s digital collection, or subscribe to one online. Most public libraries have fairly extensive digital collections where you can electronically “borrow” ebooks for weeks at a time. You can even place yourself on a wait list for a given book and adjust your settings so that the title will automatically download to your device as soon as it becomes available! If you are looking specifically for children’s books, Gateway to the Classics also offers hundreds of titles from the golden age of children’s literature. (You can also gain access to regular free ebook downloads by subscribing to our blog here.)

8. Make reading a part of your nighttime routine

Numerous studies have examined the negative effects that blue light emission from smartphones can have on melatonin production and the quality of your sleep. Reading before bed instead of spending time facing a screen can make it significantly easier for you to fall – and stay – asleep, with the added benefit of giving you extra time to read! It’s both a lovely bedtime routine, and an easy way to improve your “sleep hygiene.”

9. Read during breaks in your day

If you do shift work or have a regularly scheduled lunchtime, reading can be a great break-time activity. Depending on your line of work this may be more or less difficult, but if you are able to take a break of 10 minutes or more, try reading just a few pages during that time. I especially recommend it if you are an introvert working in a highly social setting – those few pages can offer a good deal of solace during an otherwise hectic day. (I did this both as a teacher with frequent interruptions, and also during clinical shift work where I had a 30-minute lunch break in the afternoons. In both cases it was something I looked forward to each day and something that greatly re-energized me.)

10. Do what works for your schedule

You don’t need to wake up at five am to find reading time each day, nor do you have to read before bed or during your lunch break if those aren’t feasible times for you. However, do start paying attention to the small gaps in your schedule and the times that are conducive to reading and take advantage of them as you can. If you can find time to read for ten minutes a day, two or three times a day, do that. It’s a starting place that demonstrates your commitment to reading and twenty or thirty minutes of reading is far better than zero. 

11. Have reading dates

There’s absolutely no reason you can’t meet up with a friend at a coffee shop or have someone over just to read. People study together, so why shouldn’t they also read together, either independently or aloud? This can also be a romantic way to spend time with your significant other. I had a college professor who once told me that she and her husband read War and Peace aloud together before bed over the course of about a year and that it was an experience they will both cherish forever.

12. Keep a list of books you want to read in the future

Our final suggestion is to maintain a “to consider reading” list. This list is meant to include the diverse books that you hear about on a podcast or in an off-hand comment from a friend, and it should be long, un-curated, and include titles from a wide range of categories. It is intended as a resource for when you are in a literary dry spell and simply need inspiration. Return to it whenever you want to read something new, but aren’t sure what to pick up next. As a note: you definitely do not need to read all of these books during your lifetime, nor should you attempt to do so; simply maintain the list as a large resource pool and use it on an as-needed basis.

Share your experience

​What other ideas would you all add to this list? Please let us know in a comment below what your most successful strategies have been for finding time to read independently as an adult!​

A Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet

by Lisa Ripperton
January 3, 2019

      Every child should have an opportunity to hear a story and a song, a poem and a rhyme every day of the year. With the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet now available at Gateway to the Classics, it is easy to make that happen for five year olds.

      When you enter the Read Aloud Banquet, you are greeted by a brightly illustrated rhyme and a selection from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Upon refreshing the screen, a new rhyme and a new poem appear to delight the reader.

      Scroll down and you encounter a set of nursery songs for the current month with sound controls so you can start and stop them. These songs come from The Baby's Bouquet and The Baby's Opera, selected and illustrated by Walter Crane. Click on the song title and you will see illustrated sheet music for the song, often followed by a full page color illustration, like the one pictured below. According to Frances Epps, "The Baby's Opera and The Baby's Bouquet are perfect feasts of delight to little people of two years old and upwards; the picture and music alike fascinate them." ("Song for the Nursery," Parents' Review, Volume 1, pp. 144-164). Every month automatically brings a new set of songs fitting for the season.

       Scroll down to the bottom and one of the 17 richly illustrated tales from Frederick Richardson's Book for Children and Old, Old Stories Retold will be on view. As with the rhyme and poem, a new folk tale appears when you refresh the screen. A few of these tales have accompanying audio, narrated by Daniel Ripperton.

       In scrolling to the bottom we passed over a schedule of readings for every day in the week. The week displayed corresponds to the week of the year. In this plan there is a story and a rhyme to read each day. Click on the week number in the lefthand column to display all the readings for the week that you can then copy into a file for offline reading, if need be.

     As you can see from the overview of the reading plan below, the stories and rhymes come from a variety of different books in a range of genres. Instead of reading one book straight through, with this plan you read from a different genre every day of the week, with each book read once a week over a number of weeks.

​The​ yearly plan consists of four 12-week blocks, with a 4-week holiday block at the end of the year. ​Where possible, books are started at the beginning of a 12-week block. The stories in the books read on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday ​should be read in order, from the beginning. ​The stories in the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday books, which could be read in any order, ​have been arranged as much as possible to follow the seasons, at least for those living in the northern hemisphere.

       Subsequent posts will offer more information about the different books in this plan and why they were included.

     NOTE: The Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet is NOT meant as a replacement for the reading of picture books. Nor is it meant as a substitute for participating in whole family read aloud time. Young children gain more than you might imagine from listening to books well above their comprehension level.

The Power of Reading Every Day

       The selections for a given day can typically be read in under 15 minutes, assuming no interruptions. With interruptions, of course, it will take longer. In the course of a year, if you read all the selections, you will complete the reading of THIRTY books in their entirety​, and selected stories from a handful of others. Granted, EIGHT of them are one-time reads, but that still leaves TWENTY-TWO substantial books to finish in the course of a single year!

Spreading a Broad Feast

       In offering the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet we are spreading a broad feast. Children who partake are likely to show a greater interest in the out of doors, wonder more about the lives of children in far away places and in bygone times, have a greater capacity for expressing their thoughts, and have more examples to guide their actions. Take a look at the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet now, try it out with your child, then share your thoughts with us by adding a comment below.

>
https://www.acultureofreading.com/page/28/
www.acultureofreading.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-05
78952
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FXM3NV2R3B5IFPVF4BJKH4DVW6TZF4EC
<urn:uuid:244c50c9-43b1-4497-b6e9-724c41799c30>
2020-01-22T10:53:38Z
194.1.147.6
text/html
sha1:NCS5MHVVYBGRABCJHE27ZYTMVITG4RMK
<urn:uuid:ad6d49b1-1e8e-4192-8dac-ac4ac0abd7aa>
https://www.acultureofreading.com/page/28/
response
<urn:uuid:8eebe6e8-9434-466b-bae5-fbae3f99f9ed>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-05
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-158.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/