Cheating sleep

So, I woke up this morning...

Actually, that should read, 'was rudely woken up by my damn radio alarm'. Every Monday morning it's the same thing: disbelief. The weekend couldn't have gone that quickly, could it? My problem is that I am a heavy sleeper and having to get up at 7am does shocking things to my state of awakeness during the week. So any chance I get, I just sleep on and on - I can't remember the last time I woke up naturally rather than being woken up by something or someone. (This is one of the good side-effects of being a heavy sleeper; no waking up at 3am and not being able to go back to sleep.) At the weekends I'll sleep until ten or eleven o'clock, result, I have a 12-hour day which means I can't get to sleep, especially on a Sunday. So inevitably, on Monday mornings I'll have had about 6 hours sleep with which to revitalise myself.

My solution? To fool myself into thinking that I get a lie-in. And how do you do that, I hear you ask, when you arise at such an ungodly hour? Simple. I set my alarm for 6.30am, struggle out of bed and into the bathroom, then back to bed for half an hour and get up just as the 7 o'clock news finishes. This may sound mad, but if I wake up at 7.00 and have to leap out of bed and immediately get ready, I just won't be able to do it. I won't even be able to read the paper at breakfast. Whereas this way, firstly, I have an incentive to get up (because the sooner I get up, the sooner I can go back to bed), and secondly, I'm just awake enough to actually get up when my second alarm clock goes off.

So there you go; bent back tulips can solve that age-old problem of how to get out of bed. And you thought I did nothing for you...

Book habits

Today, class, we're going to talk about books...

I've always been a fast reader, although over the past couple of years I've found this to be a disadvantage in two ways: firstly, I run out of books to read (which is one reason that I reread all my books!), and secondly, I seem to read books too quickly. Reading 150 pages in one sitting can really distort the time frame of the book, and it feels a bit rushed. I don't have time to properly get inside the characters' heads or to fully comprehend what's happening on a fundamental level, which can be a problem when it's the first time of reading.

My realisation of this trait of mine was triggered by a reading of Gone With The Wind, my favourite book. I first read it when I was eleven, and since then I've read it 15 times. (In six years, if anyone's counting.) A few years ago I read it in six days. On average, that's 180 pages and 2 years in the book's time span per day. And it's not as if I was making an effort to zoom through it - this was during term time! It felt very rushed and didn't really make an impact on me like it usually does, which could also have been due to the fact that I'd read it less than six months previously. Since then, I make myself take a long time when I read books (or at least, stop myself from reading more than 100 pages per day), and I'm only allowed to read Gone With The Wind once a year... another 7 months to go then!

However, this has led to me reading different books simultaneously - yesterday I was reading five, but I finished one of them (thank goodness!). This ensures that for any particular book I won't have finished it with the plot flying past me, and it also lets me have one book in my bag for the school coach and a few on my bedside table (nightstand) which I can choose between, depending on how tired I am.

I have no idea how many books I read over any given time period - I'd guess at about 50 in a year, but really I don't know. In junior school I remember a chart on the classroom wall with all our names on, and whenever we finished reading a book we woud have to bring it in (for proof) and then we'd get a sticker to put next to our name on the chart. Other people (according to the chart, anyway) got up to twenty books, I think. Being the lazy little sod that I was, I apparently read two books over the whole school year (when in fact it must have been at least ten times that number).

I remembered this earlier this year, and started keeping a spreadsheet of which books I was reading and when I started and finished them. So far, in 22 weeks I've read 39 books, although this has been skewed somewhat by the inclusion of my two-week summer holiday, when I read 13 books (including the 1100-page Gone With The Wind and two 600-page volumes). And I actually have another 39 books on my 'to read' list (not including the three that I'm currently reading). So, that should keep me going until the summer holidays at least :)