The Book Tower

My posts are becoming increasingly serious lately so a meme to lighten things up. From Booking Through Thursday. Reading in public, do you do it?

Oh yes. It’s very rare for me to go out without a book in my bag or in my pocket and I find it very easy to concentrate and read in a public place. I could probably settle down to a few chapters in a football stadium. On a recent visit to Sea World in Florida, when the heaving crowds were approaching football stadium levels, I sat in the shade with my book and let them all barge by. My family have got used to me.

If I’m going out for the day and I’ve less than 100 pages to read in my current book, I’ll take the next book I’m planning to read with me as well. Is this eccentric behaviour? If I’m out for the day without a book and at a loose end, maybe with an hour to spare, I’ll buy a book to read if I’m able to. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or supposed to be doing. As the parent of an eight year old I can easily concentrate on a book with hoards of children buzzing round me, a skill I perfected recently after spending a day in the Children’s Museum in Chicago.

I can read in parks, on buses, planes and trains, standing up in bars and sitting down in restaurants. Being married to a smoker, this is handy as smokers are now obliged to vanish, either on their own or with other smokers, for periodic ten minute breaks. If it wasn’t for my book, I would be horribly alone. I have even been tempted to read in the theatre, after being dragged to a show I desperately didn’t want to see, but held back not wanting to offend the people I was with. For similar reasons I lay off reading during a wedding ceremony, and the speeches that followed.

I don’t think there’s anything odd about reading in public. It’s a combination of shutting out the rest of the world, not giving two hoots as to what other people might think of you, and remembering to take your book in the first place. Being married to a shopaholic, I’ve never yet been refused in department stores when I’ve asked for a stool so I can at least sit down and read in some comfort. Why just stand there and look bored?