Where I read: A photo essay

Where, when, and how I read — and, importantly, why

A lot of people have told me they don’t have time to read.

I think I’d feel the same way if I didn’t already read, so here I’ll show you a few examples of when and where I read.

Let it also be known: I don’t have children. I don’t want this essay to make anyone feel bad. I’m just spreading the message that books can go anywhere phones go, if you want them to :)

Let’s get started.

I read in the obvious places: libraries, bookstores, cafes, bed.

I read on planes, trains, streetcars, and boats.

I read in cars, but mostly audiobooks, since I’m wired for motion sickness.

Actually, thanks to audiobooks, I can now take my books to even more places: morning walks around the city, long hikes on the weekends, the picnic table at the dog park to make sure my little nuisance isn’t, well, making a nuisance.

A terribly, terribly cute nuisance

I’ve heard Cal Newport talk about the Rory Gilmore method: never leaving home without a book in your hand. That’s basically the Amelia Zimmerman method too, although my combination of Kobo and Libro.fm means I’m usually dragging 250+ books out the door with me, and it all weighs less than a stick of butter.

I read at my desk between meetings, in the foyer at the vet clinic, and for hours on end during the occasional ER visit.

I read in all seasons, but the audiobooks get a hammering in the summer

I read at restaurants, boring sports games, casual family hangouts, and vacations. I’m not purposefully antisocial, but when people start doing their own thing, or before they’re up in the morning, I’m straight into a book.

Stealing a quiet rainy morning to read during family vacation week

I even read during my Canadian Citizenship ceremony — there were some long waits during that one.

Proud to be Canadian, but that was a long morning

I’m fortunate to travel regularly, so I read in taxis, airports, and queues for tourist attractions, which are always excruciatingly hot and poorly organised.

Reading on a balcony in Zanzibar

I even read in hot air balloons.

This is a joke, obviously, but we did have fun snapping this photo

I read so much I now need glasses for anything further away than a book — although I do also spend a regrettable amount of time on my laptop.

Ice cream is bad for you; books are good. They balance each other out.

I read on the couch, on the patio, and occasionally in a hammock on vacation.

A Greek island, a lemon tree, and a book I didn’t end up finishing

I love reading by water — the pool, the beach, or on the verandah with the rain pelting down.

Greece seemed like the right place to read The Secret History. I don’t have sophisticated taste in fiction — perhaps that’s why I enjoyed this one.

On slow weekends, I’ll read in my yellow reading chair.

My favourite place to read. Unfortunately, it’s usually taken.

And every year, on my birthday, I let myself read all day. This year, my 30th, I read The Extinction of Experience.

My 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th birthdays (there *is* a book there for my 28th — Personal History, by Katharine Graham)

I’m a bookworm, but not the sort who loves to stay holed up in her room. On the contrary, I need to get out frequently. The best part about living in bookland is that books, as Stephen King says, are a uniquely portable magic. They transport us to new places and perspectives, and they can also easily and cheaply be transported especially in a digital world.

Many of the insights and realisations I’ve had while reading are tied in my memory not just to the book and the author, but also to the location where they occurred to me.

Where travel cannot take you, books can.

But books do more than let us escape the world we live in.

They also help us make sense of it.

I love this clip of Ronny Chieng explaining the breakdown of America.

“If you don’t read enough… you don’t have the vocabulary to describe your reality. Because you didn’t read enough. You’ve gotta keep reading. You’ve gotta keep reading — beyond the hashtag. There’s a book behind the word. You’ve gotta keep going. You can go at your own pace, but you’ve gotta finish the required reading, otherwise we can’t have a conversation.”

That’s why reading matters — and when I talk about reading, I’m talking about real books. Wide-ranging books. Not just BookTok romances or Atomic Habits.

Not everyone can or wants to read as much as I do. But everyone should read a little. Enough to understand where we’ve come from and where we might go. To grasp what it might be like to be born at a different time, in a different place, under different circumstances.

This is what smartphones, the internet, social media, was supposed to do. To show us how others live, to get us to connect better, to help us understand each other. Instead, it has divided us, confused us, enraged us, and exhausted us.

And so I think it’s time we put down the phones and picked up something a little longer. Something that takes more work to produce and more effort to consume. Something that is, ultimately, a little more human.

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