It’s summer now in Fairbanks. This is the season almost all of us love: the city turns green, and we feel like we’re living in a garden. The sun scarcely goes below the horizon, and we’re hit with a daylight-induced mania. We can garden, canoe, and comfortably spend time outdoors.
I’m a bicyclist. Though not yet hard-core enough to bike all year — it does get quite chilly here — I manage to ride for the warm half of the year, roughly mid-April to mid-October, and it makes me happy to get out in the sun and to use my body nearly every day.
But I’m not quite happy.
This morning, I looked at the side of my bed and saw the book I’m reading: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I tried once as a nine-year-old to read it; it seemed boring. So now I’m giving it another shot, and it seems much better. However, there doesn’t seem to be the time I want for it.
From wake-up to departure, I’m eating breakfast, reading the news, preparing my lunch, showering, and getting dressed. At my lunch hour, I’m usually too tired to read much; it’s easier to nap. From arrival at home to bedtime, I’m playing with my kids, eating dinner, washing dishes, and putting kids to bed (though sometimes I’m at meetings instead). By bedtime, I’m able to read, but not in quantity: usually, after a few minutes, the book falls out of my hand as my head lolls over to one side.
What I really miss is the time I spend on the bus during winter. Between work and home, it’s about a twenty-five minute trip either way — so, by taking the bus, I secure myself forty to fifty minutes of reading every day. Even with that, I often felt that my progress through books wasn’t speedy enough. But now? I’ll be working on The Hobbit for a month, maybe two. There’s a good chance that I’ll lose whatever pacing the book has and start to find it boring — just because I can’t read it fast enough.
I know, I know: it’s all about my choices. To make more time for my reading, I could choose to skip the local newspaper, or spend less time with my wife and kids, or forego personal hygiene. Obviously, I could give up biking and take the bus again, but — let me be plain — when you face a lengthy, forbidding winter like ours, you’d have to be a complete jackass not to spend as much time as outside, during our beautiful summer months, as possible.
I’m not looking for something to scrape out of my schedule to make time for reading. What I really want to convey is this:
- One major advantage of riding the bus — that is, aside from the money you can save on car payments, gasoline, parking, repairs, tire changes, and the inevitable tickets — is that it gives you time to read. Not audiobook “reading”, but the kind that demands your imagination, allows easy re-reading, and invites contemplation. If you are already spending half an hour twice a day to warm up your car, scrape your windows, drive, and park, then consider taking that hour back as a time when you can read just for yourself.
Yup. I read The Name of the Rose on the bus going from home to work and back again while I lived in Seattle. The ride was long enough that I could get into this complex and detailed book. Only got out at the wrong stop a couple of times.
And, er, Paul, don’t you mean “the local newspapers”? Ahem?
your friendly local publisher….
No, no, no, Deirdre. As much as I appreciate The Ester Republic, I will appeal to that publication’s own web page, which refers to it as a “rag” and a “periodical” but states quite clearly, “In no way should this publication be mistaken for a regular newspaper.”
Leonard Pitts had a column on this the other day – how he and other readers he knows aren’t able to read books any more. The internet is consuming their reading time and there was even speculation whether the internet was hurting people’s ability to do one thing for an extended period.
I just noticed last night that I was on p. 416 of Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Mostly I read a few pages, like you, before falling asleep. The only real progress I’ve made has been in airplanes and airports. I have about another 170 pages to go. I started this back in February. Though I have read a couple of other books in between.
When I was a single mother, I did not drive. (Protective parents– long story.) I got around by bus with three little kids in Anchorage, Alaska. We walked longish distances that spanned what seemed like miles. As much as I resented not driving and had to overcome great fear that I’d be killing people as my father had suggested if I ever got behind the wheel, I also miss the bus. My sweet daughters and I had conversations and talked all the time. I never wanted them to know how miserable I was so I put on a happy face and we’d jump to stay warm or sing songs, in the summer it was sheer joy to get dressed up and act like we were rich and drive down.
Now my eldest is in Anchorage and she doesn’t have a car. (She got her permit at 14, but we couldn’t afford to buy her a car.) She sometimes calls me and chats then says she has to go– her bus is coming but adds that she misses our time from years ago riding the bus. Last winter, she said that it never seemed as cold when I had her and her sisters as it does now, and she realizes that it’s because of me.
Thank you for getting me on a memory lane trip! :)
Hmpf. It’s an irregular newspaper, Paul, a quasi-newspaper-magazine of irregular content. And it is a periodical (newspapers and magazines are periodicals, unless they’re one-offs), and while it doesn’t actually have much in the way of rag content (that sort of paper is VERY expensive), it is quite cheerfully the National Rag. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a newspaper…
But of course, this is all completely off topic. Back on topic, I didn’t drive until I was, lessee, 35? Being epileptic and not having my seizures under control for a long while made it a bit dicey to get behind the wheel. This meant I walked a lot of places in Fairbanks, because Walt’s Bus and later the borough bus lines just weren’t enough to cover the times and places I’d need to go. We still need more of them.
Not a resident of Fairbanks, but I just recently found this blog and like the ideas put forth by Paul and all the people that make comments .
I am a bicyclist also, and live in rural Virgina. Things have changed much here, as in Alaska, over the years. Growing up here in the 50s, you didnt buy every edible item at a store or market, you only went to the stores for hardware, and non perishable items. The local store was the center of the community, a gathering places. These stores were all over the communities, you didnt have to drive 50 miles to go get a box of nails if you needed them.
Rural Virginia has changed since then, there are no more local stores, you have to drive into a town to get the basic necessities,we have lost our ability to be self sufficient in this modern, technology fueled world. People living in the country these days without chickens and not knowing how to raise a garden……
I will be reading this blog often, and yes, I have been in Fairbanks, I loved the city.
From Virginia…a “Greenie”………….