This morning, I did something I haven’t done regularly for years – read in bed. For most of my life I’ve read in bed both at night, before falling asleep, and in the morning, after waking up. Then when I was regularly attending the sleep clinic in 2006-07, I was told that I needed to train my body/mind to associate being in bed with sleep and nothing else – if I was awake in the night for more than twenty minutes I should get up, go to another room and do something quiet and relaxing, and only go back to bed when I was ready to go back to sleep. Unfortunately, this never really worked – I could be awake in another room for two hours and feel myself dozing off, then go back to bed and lie down and my brain would be wide awake again. Over the last few years, I’ve started listening to the radio in the night – or rather, downloaded plays and readings from BBC Sounds – and sometimes I fall back to sleep, and sometimes I don’t, but I’ve never really got back into that habit of always reading in bed.
But it bothers me that the only time I read whole books the way I used to is on holiday, or long journeys – and even then, it’s been replaced by listening and/or crocheting. When you’re reading, you can’t do anything else, but if you’re being ‘read to’ (ie listening to the radio, or audiobooks) your hands and eyes are free to be doing something else – like crochet – or any other kind of handicraft, (or even chores come to that). And because I only read in fits and starts (often, to be honest, when I’m on the loo), I never really get into what I’m reading, not helped by the dyspraxic effect that I don’t take in what I’m reading on the first time through, and am constantly forgetting who’s who and what’s happened.
This morning, around six, when I’d already been listening for an hour or so, I decided to read from my Kindle, a thriller that came up as a recommendation based on my previous reading, and which I won’t identify because I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone else. I’ve been enjoying it, but as I’ve only been reading it for 10-20 minutes or so a day, it’s been slow going, and I’d started to feel that it was becoming a tad repetitive. This morning I’d read three chapters, when, at exactly half way in (according to the Kindle read percentage), there came a catastrophic event, in which one of the protagonists was killed and it seemed all was lost. I couldn’t help but the think that the author must have read/been told the advice about having a major climax/plot reveal at the end of Act Three – and I was rather shattered that s/he’d killed off this character (or has s/he? It sounds pretty conclusive, but who knows?)
Dammit, I’ve run out of words again…