2012, A Year in (Not) Reading
Friends, I have a sad confession to make: in 2012, I read all of 31 books. That's... pretty damn low, for me. It's roughly half the books I read last year, or the year before. It's probably the fewest books I've read in any year in the last decade, and certainly since I started keeping track. There are any number of reasons for this sudden drop: early in the year, the stress of scrambling for mortgages and the other busywork of buying an apartment made mindless, or at least less demanding, entertainment like film and TV a lot more appealing than reading, and moving into my own place has meant that where last year I used public transport infrequently, now I hardly use it at all, which has cut into those dead parts of the day that are just perfect for disappearing into a good book. But the truth is that reading, like anything else, is a habit, and that once broken--replaced with the kind of activities that take less out of you at the end of a long day, such a...