Reading more (quickly)

I haven't ever really kept tabs on how many or how quickly I have read books.  It's always been one of those things that I have done slowly, but it's one of those things I have enjoyed doing.  I have people in my life, like my mom and wife, who can breeze through any book that they pick up.  I know my mom will bring two or three books with her on vacations because she has always enjoyed reading and reading at long periods of time.  That's why we got her a Kindle for Christmas last year.  That way she can just bring that little tablet as opposed to her small library that she has back home.  My wife is the same way.  She can sit down for a couple of hours and just read.  I've had to kick her out of bed a few times in the past because I had to get up early in the morning and she was still reading at midnight.  It's just one of those things that some people can do for great lengths of time. 

Not so much me.  I think that part of the problem is that I read at night.  I will want to keep reading, but I know that if I do, it wouldn't take long before it's eleven or later and I have to get up in four hours.  So I read a chapter or two a night and call it good.  Now, depending on the size of the book and the amount of chapters, that can take a very long time to get through just one book.  And then there are the books that are broken up into three or four parts as opposed to chapters then it's all about finding a good stopping point.  With a well written book, that is hard to do at times.  It's usually about finding a page with a sentence ending it. 

Around Christmas time and my birthday (only two months apart), I get several books or gift cards to a book store.  I rush out to get books and add them to my collection.  The problem?  I still have books on the shelf from last Christmas and my last birthday that I have yet to read.  I counted them out when we moved to Minnesota and if I remember correctly, I have fourteen books on the shelf that I haven't read yet.   Some of them have been hanging around for more than a year.  The bad thing is that I see them there collecting dust and I try to tell myself that I will read faster to get to them.  The problem?  Once I get to them, I will slow right down because there are more history books than novels.  It's going to be heavy reading.  It'll be like I'm back in college, but with no paper or discussion circle around which historian the author hacked or what facts did the author leave out to make their point or why book 'A' is more important than book 'B'.  It'll be for pleasure.  History reading for pleasure?  Yeah, it happens.

I think that the best way to go about reading more in a year is to set aside more time during the day to read.  During my weekends off finding time to sit in the bedroom away from the television and the computer and lose myself in the pages.  You hear people say that they just want to curl up with a book and read the afternoon away and it can be easy for some people to do.  I just never have because I am a slow reader and take my time reading through the piles of books that never have an end to them.