I’ve been reading a lot over the last two weeks. Catching up on things. When I sit back and think about it maybe “A lot” gives the wrong impression since I’ve increased my reading to, maybe, an hour a day. But that adds up. Some of that hour came out of my “Taking a break” video game time. Often when I want to sit down and rest for ten minutes or so I take out my iPad and play Subway Surfer, Drop 7, or some other video game. A game that I can play briefly and then put down and get back to doing something. Other times I read some comics instead.
I always have comics to read. I go to the comic shop each week and buy new ones. Those ones don’t generally pile up but other things do. Like the trade paperback collections I get. Usually I get four to six comics a week. A TPB is about the equivalent of that. It collects anywhere from four to ten comics. So each TPB is about the equivalent of a week’s worth of comic reading to me. With each comic book taking about ten minutes to read (plus I read them all twice about a week apart) each TPB should only be an hour’s worth of reading but with ten or twenty books piles up it turns into a lot. Plus I got a few extra comics that I won in a YouTube contest that I wanted to read. So I decided to put down the video game and read a comic. I’ve read a few of them that way recently.
Oddly I read my collected editions much like I read my regular comics. Most people say they like collected editions because they find reading “A huge chunk” of a comic all at once to be satisfying. I don’t like that so much. I prefer to skip around from comic to comic much like they were individual issues. So I sometimes have two or three TPBs going at once. I’d read an issue in one of them and then next time pick up a different one. I like that comics are periodicals and that I have time to digest what happened in one issue before I read the next. I’m not in a rush. I also like the variety of reading many different comics in a short space of time. I find that a lot of fun.
I finally got around to reading my magazines too. “My magazines” used to have a totally different meaning ten or twenty years ago when I had subscriptions to twelve or more magazines a month. Now I have only two subscriptions left. Yet I had four issues of “The Sun” piled up to read. I’m not sure how that happened. With only two subscriptions, the other being “Archeology”, magazines rarely pile up these days. There have been months when the new issue of “The Sun” has arrived and I had yet to read the old one but never have I let four of them pile up.
“The Sun” is a literary magazine that is often filled with heartfelt and sometimes sad stories so on occasion I’ve found myself not wanting to read it because of the sad stories. But I always enjoy the magazine when I actually do read it. I think the fear of the sad stories somehow got to me this winter and I avoided reading it. I’d look at it and then push it aside. The issues just sat there until I decided to start a new reading habit.
My new habit was to read before I go to bed. I know this is something a lot of people do but it’s not something I’ve ever done. Often by the time that bedtime rolls around my eyes are too tired to want to read and I don’t have the concentration for it. So I said to myself I’ll only read for ten to twenty minutes. I seem to have that much time anyway between turning off the TV and getting into bed. I also don’t read in bed. I read in my regular reading and sitting chair. I’ve always found it uncomfortable to read in bed. Plus they say it helps people to fall asleep if they don’t read in bed. I can go along with that.
I read all four of those magazines in about two weeks. I enjoyed them too. “The Sun” is a good read and once I got started with them I didn’t want to stop. Of course I stopped every night after my allotted twenty minutes were up but I also read them during the day instead of my video game break. Sometimes reading is like that with me. I don’t want to put the concentration into reading but when I do it’s always enjoyable. I think sometimes I just have a hard time sitting still.
Now that I’ve finished my magazines I can move on to some of the books I have piled up on my iPad/Kindle app. I read mostly non-fiction when it comes to books and have at least a half dozen books on various subjects that I’m in the middle of or haven’t started that I haven’t gotten back to in months. Plus I’ve been getting a free novel every couple of months or so from Amazon and I haven’t read one of them. They come as part of my membership in Amazon Prime so I pick one when they send me a choice even though I haven’t had the inclination to read any of them yet. I can’t pass up a digital book since it takes up no physical space in my life.
One more category I want to add to my reading list is some of my old comics. Every comic fan I know says “I should really re-read that comic” but who has the time? Especially if you are buying new comics every week. But now that I made a little more time I’ll have to keep going with it.
Discussion ¬