I close my door and lock it tightly behind me. I ensure that I’m not in a position to be frequently interrupted before I climb into my bed and open my book. I often have a drink next to me, usually coffee and/or water to ensure I don’t have to get up later when I decide that I’m thirsty. With all of that out of the way, I am ready to start reading.
In the context of reading for English courses, part of the trouble of beginning to read is deciding which readings to prioritize. Of course, taking multiple English courses per semester means that you are always going to be assigned multiple readings in a week, and some are inevitably going to be more important than others. Likewise, some are going to be more of a time investment than others. A poem is naturally going to be shorter than a novel, and it is for that reason that I generally approach short poems before any other readings. Doing this allows my reading list to get noticeably shorter, which makes future reading less intimidating. Shorter readings can also be scheduled a bit more flexibly. As often as it’s discouraged, getting a reading done the night before (or even the morning of) so that it’s fresh in your memory is a lot easier to do when you only have to read one-hundred lines of poetry. Novels, meanwhile, require a bit more deliberate scheduling if you want to finish in time for the next lecture.
I always aspire to read as much as I can in accordance to each of my courses’ schedules, but things are rarely so easy. For example, finishing a novel for a seminar or lecture can be difficult when the novel is a slog to get through. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to finish the reading, or that I never finish readings I can’t get absorbed in, but it makes things significantly more difficult. I only bring this up because it is a struggle I often faced as an English student, though I don’t have a clear solution to it. I’m not even sure a solution is required. Like everything else, literature is incredibly subjective, so no student is going to like every reading. There will always be slogs. Perhaps then, the real aspirations for myself as a student are to achieve a sense of balance regarding readings, rather than powering through everything. After all, I would much rather finish a slogging novel and balance it out with a more palatable reading, rather than read everything and be too drained to mentally participate in a lecture or seminar. In my own experiences, reading as an English student is often based around this balancing act, which is why it’s important to achieve that ideal location that I sketched out in the first paragraph.