In which I resolve to read less

“You can see it’s not normal, though, can’t you?” my husband asked. A few days ago the Jehovah’s Witnesses popped by with a leaflet urging me to read some Bible verses. My response was to flip through my Bible looking up the verses, while getting annoyed that they’d supplied a reference for looking them up rather than just printing the relevant verses.

“I mean, it’s only a short bit. They could easily have fitted it all into the actual leaflet.”

“What are you doing?”

“It’s not as if you’d have any copyright issues with the Bible. I mean, the authors are all dead.”

“Just because they gave you a leaflet -”

“And if they’re not dead, what are they going to do? Forgive you?”

He gave up and went jogging. When he came back, I’d just stopped reading about Hannah’s longed-for son Samuel and the “little coat” she made him. Instead I was looking up the meaning of the name “Samuel” in a different book.

My husband’s main point was valid, but it’s something I have real trouble internalising: you don’t have to read everything.

I read takeaway pizza menus when they come through the door, even though I’ve only ordered takeaway pizza three times in my entire life. I read bus timetables for places I’m not planning to visit, “just to get an idea”. In the past few days I’ve pored over several knitting patterns, read reviews of a few artists I’ve never heard of and memorised advice on getting your dog to adjust to a new baby. I can’t knit. I don’t have a dog or a baby. What am I doing? And that’s just the offline stuff. Most of the non-fiction reading I do these days involves the twisty-turny paths of the web. One interesting blog post leads off to another, and before you know it, you’re reading tips for looking after your non-existent prostate. Or worse, reading trollbait and wailing: “Compulsory Hogwarts-style robes for cyclists? But they’ll catch in my bike chain! How is that a safety measure? Twitter needs to hear my views on this madness!”

As my husband so wisely says, there is an opportunity cost to all this. If I pick up a free magazine in the healthfood shop and then spend 20 minutes getting angry about what’s in it, that’s 20 minutes I could be spending doing something more useful. But because I brought it home in the first place, I feel somehow obliged to read it from cover to cover. That free magazine is not really free.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read less. Or at least, read more selectively so that by reading less irrelevant rubbish, I’ll have more time and attention to spend on reading better things (or reading rubbish that is at least relevant to my life and interests). I do think life is the poorer if you’re only interested in things that directly affect you, and I think there’s a meanness to keeping a very narrow focus on what you take in. But I’m hoping I can strike a balance where I escape the compulsion to read absolutely everything that crosses my path, while still keeping some curiosity and avoiding narrow-mindedness. After all, my husband keeps saying “You don’t have to read everything!” and I’m pretty sure St Paul said I should listen to him.