Reading

When I finished school, I looked forward to all the books I would be able to read, now that I didn't need to do homework. I've been reading some things, but I haven't read as much as I thought I would. I seem to have developed reading attention deficit. (RAD?) I'll start books but I end up not finishing them.

I was thinking tonight about why that is. One reason is that I often have the TV on when I'm at home. Before I started school, Esther and I would have the TV on almost every day, but only to watch things. It wasn't on as background noise if neither of us had something we wanted to watch. Now it ends up being company, and I'll channel-surf even when there's nothing interesting on. I used to be able to read while Esther was watching sports, but I never seem to settle the TV on sports. :)

Another reason is that I'm often on the computer - between email and Facebook and Google Reader and everything else, I find it takes more time to keep up. Additionally, I can be on the computer in the living room now with the laptop or the netbook. I can combine channel-surfing and web-surfing!

I do still enjoy reading - I just find that I'll get halfway into a book and lose some interest in it. Then I'll start another book and just forget to go back to the first one. I used to be able to juggle them, too - have one going at home and one at work and one in my bag (as well as an audiobook in the car and one on the MP3 player). Now I have one going that I carry back and forth, one audiobook on my MP3 player, and one audiobook in my car. That's about all I can keep track of at the moment.

I have been listening to a lot of audiobooks. I've been doing a lot of housework and catching up, and I can listen to audiobooks while I do that or while I play computer games. Eventually I'll settle down into reading again.