Reading in our Home

One of the joys of our new home is reading. I’ve read two lengthy nonfiction books since we moved in - and that is with the work we have done to get everything in the house usable and accessible. Just about the time we were moving in, I heard a piece on Fresh Air on NPR about habits and how we form them. According to the author, the times when we can form new habits are times of major change - birth of a child, or moving. With this in mind, I have been making a special effort to create a reading habit in our new home.

My love of reading is no surprise to you I am sure, but these efforts come from my summer reading several years ago. My grandparents lived in a small town in southern Indiana with a population of 2,000 and I spent two summers there while I was finishing my undergraduate degree. One summer I read all three of Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Johnson. It seems idyllic now - a comfortable chair and few distractions reading interesting and challenging material. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, Fayetteville has many more entertainment options than Rockport with dial-up internet and tv selections made by my grandparents.

Jen has been doing a great deal of work on her two term papers for her classes this semester, and this has provided me with forced quiet time. There are so many distractions - phones, computers, iPads - that having a time when I need to be still and quiet to let Jen work has been a great boon to my reading habits. It’s usually during these two (or so) hours a night that I read.



An integral part of my reading is having a good chair to read in. The chair (above) that I usually sit in and read I bought before Jen and I got married for that express purpose - reading in - but it rarely got used. I usually read in bed, despite hearing that that is a bad habit to be in for good sleep patterns. However, the two levels in our home helped to solve that - I now read downstairs and sleep upstairs. The chair is facing our bookshelves, which provides a nice (but not distracting) background against which I can read. Jen can speak to my problems with attention and TVs at restaurants - but that could be another post.

Our home was built to be as energy efficient as possible, and so is well-insulated with six inch thick walls (normal walls are four inches thick). This added insulation helps to dampen sounds from outside when needed. We also have windows that we open in the evenings (especially with this lovely spring we have been enjoying) so we can hear the crickets and Cosby “talking” with the group of neighborhood cats we have.



When I take a break from reading, I look up at our books on their shelves and think about our moving, unpacking, and organizing our library. Our library is a reflection of Jen and me as individuals, and as a couple. I can connect certain memories and events to some of our books (like my Lincoln anthology with Maine, or the Caro books to Indiana) and how the books are arranged on our shelves to their significance and their context.

Our library is modest - about 300 titles, but very meaningful. I think our books are a reflection both of who we are, and who we want to be. As usual, Alberto Manguel says this better than I:

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.