Back in fifth grade, I was very competitive with my best friend Heather.  Heather always did just a bit better on spelling tests, and she was a much faster reader than I was.  I vividly remember sitting at our round four-person table in our semi-open classroom (it was the seventies, baby) during reading time, one eye on how fast Heather was turning her pages and the other eye on my own page.  My goal was to keep up, but man was it hard.  I knew I was losing threads of the story in my effort to keep pace with Heather.

And today I still struggle with my reading speed.  I prefer to read slowly and savor a writer’s choice of words, but that takes time.  There are only so many hours in a week that are available for me to read, and there are times (like last evening) when I feel very pressured to just get through the book.  (Last night’s book was the choice for today’s teen book group, I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter, which I loved despite having to gobble it down in one sitting.)

I’ve been following Roger Sutton’s admonitions to lovers of children’s literature recently on his blog, and I do totally understand his thinking.  We should be reading adult literature as well as children’s literature – we should be retaining that intellectual balance in our reading lives.  But how??  I’d wager that Roger Sutton has time in his work day for reading children’s literature (it just makes sense that the editor of the Horn Book would be allowed time to read on the job), and then he can use his off hours for reading adult books.  I don’t have that luxury in my role working in a very busy children’s room.  And then, three days a week, I leave my main job and toddle off to my second job tutoring.  And then, after I get home from tutoring and eat dinner, there is always a stack of children’s books waiting for me that I MUST read.  Most are for the weekly book groups that I run at the library, and a few are children’s books that are so popular with the kids that I know I need to read them to see what they’re all about.  And then too, there are the other parts of life that need to be lived: concerts, walks in the sunshine, household chores, quality time with the spouse.

I miss my old friends Jane Austen and Henry James and Thomas Hardy, but I can’t seem to make time for them anymore.  I know I’ll never be a faster reader, and I doubt that I’ll ever have the extra time available.  What’s a girl to do??