Can't find the time to read? Luckily you have me. Here are my top 9 tips for getting more reading done!
1. Buy your
spouse and children movie/sports tickets.
Get
them all out of the house at the same time and out of your hair. It’s great if
they can all do something together, but be careful not to get roped in as a
family event. If you do somehow get roped in, take your book in your bag and
feign diarrhea, then leave. Meet up with them again when it’s over. You should
have earned at least two hours of reading, even if they were in a public
bathroom or the foyer of a cinema.
2. Pretend
you’re having an affair, but it’s with a book and you’re lying on a blanket in
the park.
Having an affair requires a lot of
subterfuge, lying and finding blocks of time to spend with your illicit lover.
However, since no one really wants two lovers interfering with their reading
time, make your torrid betrayal with a book. Or several. You hussy.
3. Hide in
your car in the garage.
What is a car really, but a cone of silence?
Four walls, a roof and some chairs that you can sit in and ignore your kids and
that bloody computer game they love so much.
They can’t ask you for a drink and snacks if they can’t find you. Just
slip into the garage, cuddle up in the car and get a few chapters in before
they seek you out, like some hellish, unwelcome game of hide and seek.
4. Say
you’re going grocery shopping, order delivery and go to the library.
Did you know you can have groceries delivered
these days? Organise your shopping list online, place your order for later that
evening then tell your family you need to go to the grocery store because they
eat like horses. Only the grocery store is really the library and you get to
spent the afternoon in the blessed quiet, surrounded by books. Stop somewhere
and get chocolate on the way home too.
5. Fake your
own death.
Sometimes, your family and friends can be
doggedly persistent or have stopped falling for your other ploys to get them to
leave you alone for one goddamn hour. In these cases, I highly recommend faking
your own death and moving to another country under an assumed name. Pick a
country with a good postal service for all those amazon orders! And, of course,
somewhere with picturesque reading spots. New Zealand is nice.
6. Sleeping
spells.
If you don’t want to leave everything behind,
you just want some time to yourself and that’s not an unreasonable thing to ask
for, goddamnnit, then it might be worth investing in some magical supplies
and simply casting your own sleeping spells. Like all DIY projects, it can take
a bit of time and there is a learning curve. If money isn’t an issue, you can
always hire someone else to do it for you, but doing it yourself can also be
considered a skill boost which can be beneficial when looking for a raise or a
new job. Two birds, one very sleepy stone!
7. Pact with
the fairy king.
If you’ve read enough books, you probably
know making pacts with fairy kings is a terrible idea. However, if you’d read
enough books, you wouldn’t be looking for solutions to let you read more books,
would you?
8. Use a
time machine to travel back to when you were a kid and had school holidays and
used them to annoy your mother so she couldn’t read.
Remember when you were a kid and it was
holidays and you were bored so you annoyed your mother who was just trying to
put her feet up and read for moment? She wants you to remember that moment. She
has been looking forward to this exact scenario for almost all of your life.
Revenge is sweet.
9. Become a
fourth dimensional being and exist in a reality that transcends time.
I feel like this one is self-explanatory.
If you’re looking for something new to read,
can I recommend you take a look at Zaide Bishop’s Bones of Eden Trilogy? Its available
for pre-order and has mutant crocodiles, queer themes, far too much killing for
a romance series and super intelligent pigs.
You can find them here:
