Over on the PANK Blog, reviews editor Kirsty Logan discusses some dos and don’ts for Meanwhile Reads. I think readers who are fairly catholic in their tastes are especially predisposed to sort their literary experiences: You have your vacation reading, your bathroom reading, your insomnia reading, your commute reading. And this category of Meanwhile Reads—what I’ve always thought of as interstitial reading—what you pick up, or bring along, for those brief stolen moments of downtime. Admitting to them is one of those secret handshakes serious readers use to suss each other out. Beyond the old cliché of reading the back of the cereal box during breakfast and or having a stack of periodicals by the toilet, we all have a personal taxonomy of material for brushing teeth, waiting for your bagel in the deli, being kept on hold by the cable company. Or as Logan puts it, “I like to read. I need to read. But I’ve got shit to do.” She has a few prime choices:
Action: Reading aloud to your significant other because s/he can’t sleep and you just want to get some reading done, damn it, but you can’t just stick your head in a book because s/he keeps turning over in bed and stealing the covers.
Do Read: At Large And At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman. Essays on ice-cream, Arctic explorers, coffee, and moving house: something for everyone. There’s even an essay on sleeping.
Don’t Read: Erotica. Either you’ll both wake yourselves up again, or you’ll have distracting dreams.
And she invites PANK readers to chip in with their own Meanwhile Reads. On this end, my toothbrushing pick lately is Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land, with its short, tasty food essays; my middle-of-the-night bedside book is Simon Schama’s Citizens, so if I can’t sleep at least I can learn something that I probably slept through in high school; and when I’m waiting for my dog to attend to her needs in the park I usually check Twitter. I’ve been known to bring a magazine with me on trips to the mailroom at work, to take advantage of those stolen minute-and-a-half increments waiting for the elevator.
And you, Like Fire readers? How do you fill up the tiny reading spaces in your day?
(Photo of women and girls stealing some reading time in July 1910, by Lewis Wickes Hine, is from the New York Public Library Digital Archives.)
I’m trying to make some progress through my shelves as well as my TBR list, so I’m pretty focused these days. Anything that can’t hold my attention from interstice to interstice just gets abandoned. My current book is open from car to office, and if I walk downstairs to buy a cup of coffee next door, as well as reading alongside a child who’s doing her reading homework for school.
Lisa, you manage to discuss this with far more eloquence and logic than I managed! I really like the idea of reading while waiting for the elevator (or lift as we call it Brit-side).
I break out in tremors and hives if I have to wait anywhere and have nothing to read. So, I ALWAYS carry a small mass-market in my purse. I also keep books in my car and my office. The current mass-market is Rumer Godden’s “Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.”