I Love Books But I Have No Time To Read

Discuss.

Maybe I should say: Moderator please move thread to ILP.

my library is my Netflix.

Ha. I know somebody else who says that. He was annoyed when the Donnell closed since he worked across the street.

If I didn't have 2.5 hours of bus commute every workday, I'd barely get through a magazine a month, let alone a book.

I Read Books But Then I Don't Watch TV.

xpost i work in that neighborhood once a week and the Donnell closing is a tragedy. better selection of new 1 week express books than my neighborhood library.

James - is this your attitude or is this something you encounter a lot from others?

As much as ILX likes to talk about fearsome door stopping novels from Pynchon and the like most fiction works are barely 200 pages. Then there are short stories, novellas and the odd poem to be looked at. So unless you have too many commitments that leave no time whatsoever...

I Love Books but I have many freelance projects; to read always feels a guilty waste of good-brain time.

Sometimes I think I would like to go to jail, just so that I could finally have some time to catch up on all the books I've been meaning to read. But then I think about getting raped in the shower and shanked in the laundry room, and I resign myself to humbly reading what I can and knowing that there will always be more to read.

And surely, in a Kurt Vonnegut sort of way, the fact that it's impossible to read all the books one would like to within one lifetime is some kind of redeeming statement about humanity.

I always have enough time to read but often choose not to read, I occasionally feel bad about that. Change in situation for me coming up is going to mess with my routine and I think I may end up reading more despite no longer commuting, I'm going to walk to work, because I'm going to be living a stonesthrow from a big library and a short walk to a number of second-hand book shops.

I Love Books But I Am Addicted To The Internet

Who really doesn't have 30 free minutes a day? It's not that you don't have the time, but as much as you love books, you must love doing other things more? Nothing wrong with that.

I Love Books But I Am Addicted To The Internet
^^^

Who really doesn't have 30 free minutes a day?
Thirty minutes a day? I'm talking about Sting-style 8-hour tantric reading sessions!

OK, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration. As was the thread title. I have the commute time to read that Jaq mentioned, about half-hour each way, which I guess would be a lot to some people. Maybe it's just those kind of hours-to-yourself blocks of weekend reading that this is thread of missing.

I do miss that, hours of just being engrossed and focused on a book. Which, I probably could do occasionally on a weekend, if I didn't let the pressure of all the other stuff that needs doing guilt me into not reading.

I have a co-worker who spends his time-off doing what single men in their 40s are allowed to do: smoke spliffs and read books by the bucket.

ilx is the greatest novel ever written

I love books but read ilx instead

I Have No Mouth and I Must Read

Ha, I actually thought of calling the thread that.

I saw some post of yours today that I thought was funny but I don't remember which one.

Was it Roxanne Shante thread?

ilx is the greatest novel ever written
More like the longest novel that you've grown tired of a while back but can neither finish nor just give up on.

the fact that it's impossible to read all the books one would like to within one lifetime is some kind of redeeming statement about humanity

Yes!

not if you're jonathan franzen

I had an idiotic classmate with this attitude: "In my junior year I made list of 120 books to read and I read them all. So what do I do now?"

"Go to the library."

"But I read all the books I want to read."

"Find more books."

"There aren't any more good ones."

She said all this as an argument against (as if anyone cared) making a "bucket list" of things one would want to do before one dies, because when one finishes, one has no reason to live. (I said, "Make a new list.")

I really can't imagine that in the process of reading those 120 books you never once got the moment of "hey, this author is pretty good, maybe I should try finding other stuff by him/her..."

Man, I could find a year's worth of reading from any ONE seasonal catalog from any major publishing house. I have become known at work as the guy to go to when you want/need a book, because I amass them like a fool. I'm so far behind on the books I already have that I freely lend out volumes I haven't even cracked yet, because I know that I've got X many books to get through before I can even consider getting into Deniro's Game or or that weirdo crime novel set in a Winnipeg daycare, or, shit Gary David Gold's new book is out--

i love books but can't do the 30 mins/day thing or whatever--i tend to read in big chunks of 2-3 hours on the weekends and not at all during the week.

also, i leave alone and somewhat irrationally really like to have tv or internet going most of the time as some sort of weird isolation-avoiding strategy.

i leave alone

good album title

oops "live," i'm a little buzzed atm

xxxxpost- She had probably already done that, such as reading the entire Anne Rice catalog.

I carry a book around everywhere I go and use any free time as a chance to dive in. This however tends to make my reading experiences very disjointed - lots of 5 to 15 minute reading sessions. So I've started up again going to the park just so I can read in the fresh air for a longer amount of time without any distractions.

I do feel guilty about not reading papers/magazines. Books are so much more enticing, and so I end up getting 90% of my current news info from the internet, meaning I know very little about the important international issues (nevermind those internal to my country), but if Sarah Palin does a press conference ooh boy I know about it straight away.

Most news is unnecessary, I'm relaxed about ignoring it these days unless something big is happening. More and more I'm into it for entertainment, and keeping abreast of things has rarely achieved anything anyway.

I can't snatch a few minutes' reading these days though - I used to be able to devote commutes to it, but I'm finding there's a hump to get over before I can open a book and that takes time. Time which iPhone, ILX and prevaricating are only too happy to fill (and are indeed keeping me from The Corrections right now).