Book Bites Announcement

Book Bites is currently on hiatus. You can still follow Book Bites on Facebook for snippets, links to giveaways, and book-related images and news. Book Bites may be updated periodically. Feel free to subscribe or follow Zja on social networking sites to see updates.

17 September 2010

BTT: Day and Night?



Booking Through Thursday asks:

“I couldn’t sleep a wink, so I just read and read, day and night … it was there I began to divide books into day books and night books,” she went on. “Really, there are books meant for daytime reading and books that can be read only at night.”
- ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, p. 103.
Do you divide your books into day and night reads? How do you decide?


I go through periods of dividing my reading. I am definitely a poly-reader. I am always reading more than one book, and dividing my time - night, lunch, train, after work - it is the best way for me to cope with all the books I am reading. For a while I can convince myself to limit my reading before bed and designate books as night reading, but then I break my promise and start reading a fast paced book for the pure joy of it. My night books tend to be classics or more serious books, because those tend to be slow reads that I can stop at any time. I spend more time mulling over the words rather than being caught up in them. I have insomnia, so I have a lot of “quiet time” to fill, but if I am really into a book, I tend to read past the time that I get tired enough to sleep. I really don’t have a lot of discipline over my reading (I am an addict after all) and the only way I can control this is if I get books I can put aside when I get tired. As well as non-fiction, classics and “slow books” I also add autographed or expensive books to this list, because I don’t take those out of my room. At the moment my night reading is a Gail Carriger’s Changeless because I found a signed copy at Galaxy and I don’t want to ruin the cover by reading it on the train. If I do decided to split up my day vs night reading, I normally try to finish Wuthering Heights, but then I get a new book and I am too excited to put it down.  When I was trying to finish On The Road I did so by designating it as my lunch time read. I had all these other books I would have preferred to read, but it has always been one on my "must read in my lifetime" list. I had only 100 pages to go, so I banned all other books at lunch time until I had finished it.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know how you can read classics and the like at night without nodding off. If I had day and night reads classics and some other books would have to be day ones, but I'd probably just nod off anyway!

If you're reading Changeless I take it you've finished Soulless and it was good? I want to read it, but I'm putting it off till I start my Steampunk challenge.

P.S. Your link doesn't go anywhere :(

Vanyel Kane said...

Only 2 rules.
1) on the train, I can not read anything that requires TOO much thought or I start feeling ill.
2) Before bed no books with rape (I'm looking at YOU Christine Feehan?). Sexy books are good at home as well, because honestly do you wanna be reading something rauchy and then look up to be staring at some hobo?

AntjieSo said...

Slightly off topic - found this whilst searching tags "woman reading painting". Do you know who the artist or what the title of the painting is?

Related Posts with Thumbnails