Reading Time

Since getting my bus pass and utilizing it for the past month, I've not only gained much needed freedom and independence, but I've also been able to increase my reading. This was one of my favorite parts of living in New York and riding the subway--all the time to read. I love not having to be in direct control of getting places, having to pay attention to the road and other drivers and just listening to the radio.

In the past month I've read four (almost five, once I finish The Scarlet Pimpernel) books and it's all because of the ample amounts of time I have to read on the bus. It's not that I don't have other, non-bus time to read, it's just that there's no better time to read than when you have no access to any other devices that could steal your attention, i.e. bed, computer, tv. It's really great when you get a book that's so good you wish the ride was longer, which has been the case with four of the five books this past month.

I started with The Wednesday Wars, a charming little book about a boy growing up in 60's Long Island. Then I indulged my passion for all things Jane Austen, successively reading Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Oh, to live in the world of Jane Austen, where good people get good in the end and the not so nice ones get their just desserts. I so immersed myself in Jane Austen, with books and movies, that my speech patterns and word usage changed!! It was next on to The Time Machine, because it was a classic, short, and I needed something different than the book I was trying to read but couldn't get in to. Nothing much to say about it, except that it probably accounted for me totally engrossing myself in the book I had written off two chapters in, The Scarlet Pimpernel, that I started reading after. Yesterday I was on page 40 and now I'm on page 174!

So thank you, Utah Transit Authority (and Cat and Pam for the recommendations) for allowing me to indulge my reading passion and making the time spent on the bus and train fly by as if I'm learning Shakespeare in Long Island, wearing corsets and dresses while learning about love, traveling to the future, or on a quest in Reign of Terror France to find a certain red-flowered hero. Because other things, like this, aren't really the best ways to use public transit.