Booking it, in thirty minutes or less

Thanks to Crystal Light for sponsoring this post. To learn more about how Crystal Light can flavor your day with 30 refreshing flavors, visit http://www.facebook.com/crystallight.

It says it right there in my Book Review Policy:

“I am not an especially fast reader, and I have a family, a full-time job, and other responsibilities unrelated to book blogging.”

When there are days when you can barely cobble together thirty minutes to read, you’re not going to get through most books very quickly. My average time to read one book is a little over a week.

But assembling that thirty minutes a day - or however many I can scrounge - is absolutely vital to my functioning like a semi-normal human being.

I always have a book in progress - occasionally more than one, but I’m usually a

Image by postbear via Flickr (this is NOT one of my TBR stacks!)

monogamous reader - and it comes with me wherever I go. On many days, it never leaves my bag until I get home at the end of the day. But I will have spent some time with it before I packed it up, and we’ll meet up again before we call it a night.

Breakfast is also vital to my functioning, although most mornings it’s no more than ten or fifteen minutes with a bowl of oatmeal, juice, and coffee - and a few pages of my book. I’ve lost the morning newspaper habit, but I still read at the breakfast table.

And I’ll never be too old for my bedtime stories. No matter how late I climb into bed or what kind of evening it’s been, I’ll read myself to sleep. Some nights I may barely make it through two pages before my eyelids start to droop, but that’s usually no reflection on the book; lying down in bed with my book is a signal to my body that it should prepare for sleep, and some nights it gets that signal very quickly - sooner than I want it to. So many books, so little time...

I bracket my days with reading. Some days I don’t manage to fit much more reading time between those brackets, but I’ve got to have the brackets themselves. I need to save those beginning- and end-of-day spaces for my books and me. I may not be an especially fast reader, but a reader is what I am, and what I need to be...even if it’s for less than thirty minutes a day.

Remember, visit http://www.facebook.com/crystallight to learn more about how Crystal Light can flavor your day with 30 refreshing flavors. I was selected and paid for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.