Imagine that kindly relatives have taken your children for a weekend. You are on a sugary beach on a secluded island. Your spouse turns to you and whispers longingly, “Let’s do what we used to do before we had children.”
“There is nothing I want more,” you murmur.
And so you adjust your chaise longues, open your books and eagerly, blissfully–read.
Do you remember reading? Not parenting books. Not magazines. And not newspapers, no auto-offense intended.
Fiction. And not quick gulps of it at night in those brief moments after you put the children to bed and before your own chin nods onto your chest. Huge swallows, whole chapters in a sitting, hour after fabulous hour.
Who has hour after hour anymore? Marty Spannraft, a mother of two from Libertyville who works part time, hasn’t in years.
She started reading “Centennial” by James Michener five years ago. It is still lying on a cabinet in her bedroom with the bookmark in it.
In the whirl of family obligations, she has lost contact with the world of books.
“Everyone says, `Oh, did you read this book?’ And I say, `I don’t even know the title of that book.’ I don’t even have time to know what books are good,” said a frustrated Spannraft.
“If my husband took my kids away and I didn’t have to work, I’d be at the library so fast,” she vowed.
It is depressingly easy for reading to become expendable. Reading is pure pleasure. It benefits the mind and nourishes the soul. It doesn’t do your grocery shopping.
You, on the other hand, have to do your grocery shopping, along with the countless other tasks that turn life into a daily race. By the time you stumble to the finish line at 11 p.m., it is hard to imagine cracking open a novel.
Reading is selfish, in the most delightful sense of the word. Our lives, however, are anything but. We are always doing for other people, and if we aren’t, we think we should be.
Spannraft feels too guilty to spend time on herself. “I always think, I have to do this, I have to do that, before I ever get any pleasuring done,” she said.
I doff my eyeglasses in respect to time-starved book-lovers who move metaphorical mountains to read. Magda Krance, assistant director of media relations for the Lyric Opera, reads while walking. She once fell face-down on a sidewalk under the spell of a particularly absorbing novel.
And after the birth of their twins 10 years ago, Susan Byshenk and her husband started team reading: One parent read aloud while the other fed babies and listened.
“We had just graduated college, and we were going nuts,” said Byshenk, of Gurnee, who has four children and still uses the system. “We had never not been reading.”
But for many of us, it takes a vacation–often a childless one–to really read a book, in the lovestruck way a good book begs to be read.
Away from home and children, your time is utterly your own. You can sit down at 10 in the morning, open a book and have at it.
If you are lucky, the book is meaty enough to stand up to that kind of intensity. And then, you are transported.
You read greedily, with abandon. The real world fades, and the book world becomes real. You eat and sleep grudgingly, impatient to get back to what really matters.
That was how I devoured Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks,” a 700-page feast about the decline of a 19th Century European family.
The experience was exhilarating–a spectacular indulgence, a literary love affair.
And then it was over, and I was back to one-night-stands with magazines, reluctant to make a commitment I have no time to keep.
But the memory of that week beckons like a beacon. Time is so precious that it is hard to justify devoting huge chunks of it to falling in obsessive love with a book.
But if you try really hard, you can do it.
