Belfast in January gets about seven and a half hours of daylight, most of it grey. I read differently in it, and I have stopped pretending that is a failure of discipline.
Shorter sessions, more of them
In summer I read for two hours at a sitting. In winter I read for forty minutes, three times a day, and the total is about the same. The winter reading is more attentive per minute and worse at holding an argument across a gap.
So I read short things in winter: essays, chapters that stand alone, poems. And the rereading, where losing the thread costs nothing because I already know where it goes.
The lamp matters more than the book
An overhead light in a dark room puts the page in a pool and the room in shadow, and the eye spends the evening adjusting between the two.
A lamp beside the chair, at shoulder height, lighting the page and some of the wall behind it, is a different experience entirely. It is the single change that has done most for my winter reading, and it cost £34.1
January
On the first Sunday of January I reread the same novel and write the date on the flyleaf under the previous dates. That list is now eleven lines long.
It has become more interesting to me than the annotations inside, because the annotations are opinions and the list is just evidence that I turned up.
Most of what I believe about reading comes down to turning up, in a small pool of lamplight, for forty minutes, in the worst month of the year.
Footnotes
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A second-hand brass reading lamp with a linen shade, bought from a house clearance in Holywood. The bulb matters more than the lamp: warm, and no brighter than 400 lumens. ↩
