Reading is such a novel-ty

What I wished my bedside table looked like, because I have soooo much time to read.

How do you find time to read? Because honestly, I just can't manage to do it and this frustrates me. I'm not talking about flicking through a magazine or newspaper to catch up on features, or the news. Every morning as the free press is thrust into my hand I'm able to read. Or when my phone flashes because the news app I use has decided it's got something important to tell me, I'll scan it over.

I can manage that, daily. Here I'm talking about actual reading. The kind where you sit for hours curled up quietly at one end of the sofa while the rest of the world goes about its business. That kind of reading.

During my uni days I'd be able to chew through books like they were going out of fashion. These days it's possible for me to count on one hand the number of books I can get through in the last 12 months.

Recently, I had a taste of what it felt like again to be able to sit and read uninterrupted with no other distractions. It felt good and I raced through a book in under a week that ordinarily would have taken me over a month to get through. To achieve this, I was sat for several hours a day on a warm beach, in a foreign country and without consistent access to wifi.

As well as enjoying a good book, it was also an actual pleasure to sit next to my partner, each of us enjoying our respective novels, pausing only briefly to update each other on dramatic plot points. I love being able to read in the company of my fella. It's one of a few activities where you can enjoy each others company in silence and separate, but still feel like you're doing something together.

Apart from on holiday, the only other time we get to indulge in this pastime is before bed, but 90 percent of the time I end up ruining the moment.

For a lot of people, delving into their book before bedtime is an ideal opportunity for getting through a few more pages. it's a good way to relax, unwind, everything else stops. The perfect time to read. Unfortunately for me reading at night is as good as taking a whacking great dose of Nytol. I can be out for the count within a page. Most nights I try to read, but the outcome is so predictable that it's become a running joke between me and my partner that I'm unable to manage more than a few pages before my eyes start to get heavy and the words my eyes are skirting over become a blur.

So bedtime reading is out. How about that hour long each way commute you make every. Damn. Day. Or all those train journeys you do?

Motion sickness. Five or 10 minutes in and I begin to feel like changing the colour scheme of whatever vehicle I'm riding in. It's the eyes down position and not being able to see where I'm going, so instead I glare at other commuters that are able to stick their noses in their good books to alleviate some of the anguish of the morning commute as they disappear into their fictional worlds. Lucky sods.

I'm fast resigning myself to the fact that I'm to become a weekend-only reader. A part time book fan that's destined to be excluded from all book clubs, because she can't finish a novel in the allotted time. Honestly, these are the things that worry me these days.

RoseC