Study break books

School is starting soon, which on the one hand I'm really excited for, but on the other hand I know it will mean much less time to read and make things. Last year I was terrible about keeping up with my reading, though I know usually I did have time I could have devoted to it. Television and the internet were just too distracting, especially since they have the added attraction of requiring zero effort. But this year I want to be better about reading. I have a large stack of books I'm really looking forward to, and I want to actually read them.

A lot of it is a matter of choosing the right books. Last year I was mostly working on books I own, but I've always benefited from the deadline library books require. Library books also tend to be new and shiny. When I'm otherwise busy, I need to be excited about a book to get all the way through it in a timely fashion. Books that provide a nice change from what I'm reading in class are also more likely to get read. Surprisingly, nonfiction worked well for me last year. I loved Bluestockings and read it in only a few days, and I read quite a lot of Victorian Visitors, too. Last fall Dorothy Sayers did a good job getting me back to reading. I think mysteries are particularly good busy-time books. They're suspenseful but not too taxing.

I think most of my problem last year was my attitude towards reading. Somewhere along the line I forgot how nice it is to just sit down and read for hours. I treated reading as something you do when you're waiting for something else to happen--before your class starts, on the bus, in waiting rooms. But this summer I've rediscovered how to spend a whole afternoon reading. With any luck, I won't soon forget that.

If anyone has suggestions for books that might make a good study break, I'd love to hear them.

Nonfiction

I've been musing a lot lately, though still not reading very much. After The Man of Property I was all set to blaze through the rest of the Forsyte Saga, but of course that didn't happen and now it's due back at the library. Instead, I've started reading a nonfiction book called The Victorian Visitors, by Rupert Christiansen. It's basically about various foreign personalities who visited London in the 19th century, and how they interacted with Victorian British culture. I'll have more to say about it when I've finished it.

I'm thinking about reading as escapism. Lately, it's nonfiction that does the best job of keeping my attention. Maybe the fiction I'm reading just isn't exciting enough. But given the amount of nonfiction reading I have to do for classes this quarter, it seems odd that I would choose more nonfiction for my pleasure reading.

I don't know if this has anything to do with this trend in my reading, but I wonder if in some ways nonfiction actually makes better escapism than fiction. In fiction, we get a more or less complete picture of characters. We know what they did, and more importantly, why they did it. In fiction, however, we have a fair chunk of facts, but little background knowledge, mere guesses at what influences and motives went into events. Nonfiction asks us to think about what happened. Fiction asks us to think about why it happened; it shoes us people's internal workings, and in that way probably makes us more aware of our own. And that probably takes more energy than just reading the tangible history and wondering vaguely what else was there.

I nearly always speed through nonfiction. I don't know why, really. I just always find something in it to fascinate me.