My Reading Life: Spring Reading Challenge

Today is the first day of the two week spring school holidays break. It’s such a nice time of the year, weather wise, even out here in the desert. It’s not too hot yet and the mornings are lovely and fresh. I am really looking forward to two weeks off work just potting around the house, not having to get up to an alarm, reading, drinking tea all day long, and reading some more.

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I’ve been thinking this week though about what I want to read and what I want to achieve over this two week break in terms of catching up on some books I’ve not yet found time for as well as reading in advance as I have quite a few really good arcs sitting there that are coming out towards the end of the year.

Usually on these two week school holiday breaks, I also like to binge watch a few television series. I don’t watch TV during term time generally, as the afternoons and weekends are too busy and I like to reserve the evenings for reading, so I save my TV viewing for the holidays. However, like all binge watchers, stopping at just one episode is a battle I often lose and before I know it, several hours have passed and I’m still watching the series, unable to drag myself away yet desperately hoping for an ending to the current episode that doesn’t have me pressing ‘next’. Hours of my life, gone watching TV. Hours of my life, not spent reading a book.

For this spring holiday break, I am banning TV for myself. No binge watching. No TV shows. At all. I’m quite excited about it. I’m not extending this to movies though, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I have kids and sometimes they want me to watch a movie with them. Second reason, I almost never watch movies, despite having a long list of ones I want to see, because I AM USING ALL THE HOLIDAY TIME BINGE WATCHING TV!! So movies are staying and hopefully I’ll get to catch up on a couple. But where TV sucks up my time, movies won’t because I would never watch more than one movie in a day, which is a whole lot less screen time that TV.

The second part of my reading challenge relates directly to what I’m going to read. For these two weeks, I’m going to exclusively read review titles. BUT, I am going to dig into the pile and read a few that I didn’t get to on time, particularly those ones that authors themselves have sent to me at their own expense.

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So there’s the plan. I’ll check in next Saturday with an update on how I’m going. My son thinks the TV ban is a mistake, but then he also said he expects I’ll be able to stick with it because I am a person who is happiest when doing boring things. Ah, teens, they know just how to wield that double edged sword!