That’s not a commitment to writing a chapter each day, although my creative side is doing much better in the last week or so. Rather, that is the commitment I made to be better at reading.
One of the things I really enjoy about the community in which I live is the way the local public library tries to improve and influence things going on here. Part of the larger county-wide network, they have been great about supporting the numerous initiatives dedicated to improving access to books, reading, technology, information, and learning resources. Every summer the county-wide system sponsors the Tulsa City-County Library Summer Reading Program, and our local branch has been pushing hard to get people doing it.
The current head librarian is someone my family has known for a while when we first started taking our children there for story time and she was the children’s librarian. . The newspaper had a fun write-up a little while ago about the record numbers our branch has been signing up for this year’s Reading Program. The Adult Reading Program is to read 4 books by the end of summer.
As a writer, you’d think that would be easy for me.
It hasn’t been of late. My current job is such that I am constantly reading – taking in huge amounts of information to sift through, find what’s needed, make decisions, and do work. But that also means my brain has been retrained to think about words in a different way – deep enjoyment of the written word has been replaced by an ability to scan through reams of information, only to discard vast amounts of it. Much of it very surface level reading. Staying focused to just “read” is actually very difficult for me now and I’m shocked at how I’m only just now realizing how bad the situation has become.
I used to be very into using Goodreads to track my desired ‘to-read’ books. I recall at least one year were I read 41 books, and that was still a slow rate compared to my teen years.
Grant Michael Gardner 