Written by Brenda Nicholas

We’ve all received the apple-a-day memo at one time or another, but how many of you follow similar health practices with books? When I was in graduate school I discovered (by force) that I am capable of reading an astronomical number of pages each week. Having discovered this and stumbling upon an interview with one of my favorite poets, Anne Waldman, who believes one should read at least one book a day, I decided to take the Anne Waldman pledge to avoid post-graduate-school complacency.

I did okay with this pledge for maybe a week or two, until I fell back into my old meandering reading patterns. My inability to finish an entire book each day, thus disappointing Anne Waldman, bothered me deeply until I discovered the reading habits of the godfather of the essay, Michel de Montaigne. Apparently Montaigne was a self proclaimed browser in his vast library, where he would “leaf through now one book now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.” I felt relieved, validated, essayistic, and secretly important upon discovering this good news. Suddenly I wasn’t a loser after all; there were other A.D.D readers out there.

So then I started to look more closely at my reading habits and discovered that I prefer to read slowly—if it’s a good read—savoring the words, images, and ideas, rereading passages over and over as if they were a spoonful of crème brûlée. And I like to bounce around from book to essay to poem to internet, following my minute-to-minute flights of fancy.

I am what Michael Henderson calls a “Member of the Society of Slow Readers,” unlike some overly literate people like Anthony Burgess, who “had not only read everything, he had read everything in several languages, and let us know that, too,”and Coleridge, another Member of the Omniscient Book Club. Just as that sense of inadequacy was creeping back into my less-than-a-book-a-day life, he mentions Milan Kundera’s reading habits, “that he based his reading on the premise that he got through books at the rate of 20 pages an hour.” Henderson raises some practical points about reading and how to balance it with, say, life. Face it, there are lawns to mow, places to see—outside the margins of the page.

So how about you? You are officially invited to share your reading habits with us here at Dust Jacket Review. We want to know if you’re a turtle or hare.