Experiments in Bookwalking

The inimitable Rob, of RobAroundBooks, often talks about a habit he refers to as "Walk Reading," which is, well, reading while walking. I've known, or known of, people who could do this. There was a young woman - a student, I always assumed - who I always saw reading a book while walking along the road on my previous commute. I thought this was slightly insane, since this was a typical small-town Massachusetts road, devoid of sidewalks and accommodating far more traffic than it had been designed to handle. But if she'd ever been run over during rush hour, I definitely would have noticed the backup, so I guess she made it work.

This is something I was always interested in doing, but never realistically thought I could. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've tried a few times without much success. My powers of concentration don't often feel strong enough to pull it off. And then there are the practical issues - depending on your physical coordination and where you like to walk, it could be dangerous. Also, apparently, trying to read while walking gives some people motion sickness.

Fortunately, I now live in a place with sidewalks, possess some approximation of grace - when I lose my balance, I can almost always recover it (this is handy, living in icy places), and am nowhere near that sensitive to motion where there's no automobile involved. And, over the Labor Day weekend, I was feeling in the right frame of mind to concentrate, so I decided to try it.

It stands to reason that certain books would be more conducive to this sort of thing than others, so I picked The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett. I'm participating in a discussion of this book in October, and I wasn't planning to read it so early, but it seemed to possess the ideal qualities. It's short, with only 120 small-format pages of widely-spaced type, and reasonably lightweight. Thus, it's easy to hold, physically easy to read, and not demanding of so much intellectual attention to preclude multitasking.

It did turn out to be ideal, and I was able to fly through over several walks. If we call walk-reading an eccentric attempt to create extra reading time, it was also a somewhat ironic choice, since the book's protagonist (i.e., the Queen of England) spends most of the story doing exactly that sort of thing (I'll discuss it more after the discussion next month).

That worked so well, I was willing to tackle something a bit more challenging. The September and October selections of the library book group are stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, so I tackled "The Golden Pot". That also worked surprisingly well, though obviously it was slower going. Our discussion was last Thursday, and I'll cover it shortly.

One thing I noticed was that walking at mid-day - with strong, direct, overhead sunlight on the page - was harder than later in the day, with more indirect light. But I'm sensitive to that sort of thing anyway, and almost always wear sunglasses outside unless it's actually dark.

I tried it again this evening with A Mixture of Frailties, but was in a distracted mood. I'm sure it also didn't help that my volumes of Davies are mostly mass market paperback, and a cramped page is harder to see while moving.