Do We Have the Time to Read?

According to an article featured in The Guardian, four million UK adults never read books for pleasure.

"Survey finds that a quarter of British adults seldom pick up a book for their own enjoyment, citing a lack of time for reading"

Now if you're a book lover like me, this statistic is rather disturbing. According to new research discussed in an article by Alison Flood, 4 million adults in the United Kingdom never find the time to read for pleasure.

Reading is one of the great ways to productively spend time. It stretches the brain, increases vocabulary, expands the imagination. It's just plain fun. But we find so many other ways to occupy the hours, either productively or not, that often reading for fun gets pushed out of the way.

I understand this dilemma. As a college student and an English major at a private Fine Arts university, I've spent the last three years scrounging for time to read on my own. Moments in between classes, tiny pockets when I don't have a literal ton (as in 2,000 pounds) of homework sitting on my desk, that half hour before my shift at work, or forcing my exhausted eyes to stay open just another fifteen minutes before I collapse into bed. It took me a year and a half to re-read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy this way, a series that once upon a time when I had all the hours in the day at my disposal, took me maybe a couple of weeks to pour through.

Apparently,

"almost 4 million adults never read books for pleasure, according to new research, with lack of time one of the most-cited reasons for not reading . . . The UK figures, however, compare favourably with recent statistics from the US, where Pew Internet found 25% of Americans over the age of 16 had not read a book in the last year."

The fact of the matter is, adults simply begin to run out of time. When you're younger, you have so much free time that you can do your chores, do your homework, play outside, and read for fun with little difficulty cramming it all in between the hours of the day. I used to spend hours upon hours reading, and I still do when I get the chance. I love nothing more than to be truly gluttonous when it comes to a book and immerse myself in one for a good 7 hours straight. Give me a bag of chips and some diet Dr. Pepper and I'm good.

But is this problem addressable? I think it is. We spend so much time doing other things-- Facebook, Youtube, Twitter. We have to go grocery shopping, we have errands to run, job searches to conduct, homework to do, thesis' to write, trips to take, friends to see, chores and cleaning to do. But how many of these things that we 'must' do from day to day could really be trimmed down and spent in a more productive form of entertainment? I could spend quite a bit less time on Facebook, personally. I could also stop checking my email 8+ times a day and do a little bit of detoxing in my favorite book or whatever novel I have in progress at the moment. I have a stack of what must be over 30 novels at the moment beside my desk and on my shelf at home that I have not read. Now, this is a delightful problem as long as you have time to address it. When I have no time to go through these books, it's like being a child stuck on the outside of a locked candy store with money to burn.

So here's my proposition. Let's spend less time wasting our time. Cut those corners of floating between websites because you're bored. Go outside. Read a book. In fact, go outside with a book. Open your window, or at least the blinds. And read a little. Tolkien, Lewis, McKinley, Le Guin, Asimov, Gabaldon, Bujold. Find your novelist, whether fiction or non, and go read a little. Poetry. Prose. It doesn't matter. Escape into another world for a little while.