Apparently, less and less people are reading books. And as much as this depresses me, I can’t say I’m surprised. My own reading habits do nothing but support these statistics.
I used to read a lot when I was younger. A whole lot in fact, that my mother would worry (and with good reason) about my ability to cope with real world problems should they come my way. But the older I grew, the more things started to get in the way of my reading. Distractions of the productive as well as of the non-productive nature began to take up more and more of my time, leaving me too tired to read at the end of the day.
The desire to read is still there, just not as strong. Now, I can stand to walk in a bookstore and not buy a single book. While not having purchased a good book lately makes me feel like I’m missing out on a lot of things, I can begrudgingly admit that I wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. Heck, I have around 10 books sitting on the shelf just waiting to be read. But what can I say? Watching TV and / or going to the movies are all the stuff I have time for now.
As a workaround to my literary drought, I have started listening to Audiobooks. Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Hickory Dickory Dock were among the books I first listened to. Then I tried out books I wouldn’t normally have read like A Confederacy of Dunces.