Good question. I am asked this often, most recently, with the request for very specific answers.

The short answer is, “Any which way I can.” If you live to read, or more accurately, live by reading, books are everywhere and strategizing how to spend time in them is as habitual as sleeping, eating, brushing teeth. I have noted that the most productive and busiest people I know are also the ones who read the most, so reading apparently doesn’t prohibit fruitfulness, but may actually increase it. This isn’t surprising when you consider that in the ingestion of stimulating ideas, the mind and heart are fed, and the more nourished the soul is, the fuller is the life of that person.

Of course, I have known people who read obsessively and do very little else, so reading alone is not the guarantee to accomplishing things. This may have much to do with which books the avid reader is consuming, but that is getting me off topic.

I don’t have a specific strategy or plan to dispense, but it is true that I read all the time. It is also true that 95% of my reading happens in short little snatches. Rather than inhibit reading comprehension and retention, I am learning the truth of what Charlotte Mason practiced: short lessons increase attention. As the busy mother of six busy children, if I had waited for the perfect quiet hour to read, I would probably still be trying to finish my first book. The elusive luxury of solitary reading most often results in sleep. I can definitely say that waiting to read before bed is probably my least effective strategy.

Like my children, my life is my learning. Like them, I have 10 to 20 books I am reading at any given time. It is no secret that variety is the spice of life, so wide reading of many kinds of books, in many diverse genres, prevents tedium. Also, like them, I do not read all those books on the same day, or in equal amounts, but read them in small portions, and read a wide and diverse variety. “Spreading the generous feast,” makes each book enticing.

Some effective methods that work for me, however, are to read a little in a difficult book early in the day, preferably before the household is up and around. I usually have three or four challenging works to read. It may take me a year to get through each one. I don’t read them every day, but do try to pick them up at least once in a week and read a little further on. I save lighter reading for late in the day to provide rest for my mind when it, as well as my body, is running down. I also read in a poetry collection of one poet every day, a little John Calvin every day, and some instructional book every day. The daily reading of the Bible is the one constant of my life.

I have books I read with my children, with my husband, with my book club, with friends. There is a book in the car and in nearly every room of the house. Waiting for the pasta water to boil, or the dryer to finish, or the children to work their math lesson is my regularly scheduled reading time.

In this way, I know I read a minimum of an hour a day, but not in one, more like four or six different books altogether. As my dear friend Robin Pack answers when people ask her how she schedules reading, “Just turn the page.” Pick up a book, read a little, and as you walk away, quickly narrate to yourself what you just read—even if it was only two paragraphs. The brain has, as Charlotte Mason says, a capacity for magical expansion. The more room you make for ideas, the more room it will have for more. And, the more ideas you have to ponder, the more intense your reading appetite becomes.

The average reader covers 50 pages in an hour. At an hour per day, total time (not just in one sitting), that will result in reading a minimum of 50-75 books a year. I shrink from boiling it down to statistics and numbers like that, because reading books isn’t to cover ground, prove a point, or chalk up accomplishments. Reading is for pleasure, growth, insight, knowledge and wisdom for living. That is why I cannot give instructions for compiling an impressive book list, but I can suggest a few practical ways books can become the food of life. The technology for how it happens eludes me, but the truth remains: reading is inseparable from living.

For the joy of reading,

Liz