Reading books takes as much focus as anything else, I find. The more distractions there are, the harder it is to do for any length of time. The more anxious or concerned the person reading the book is, the less likely they are to let themselves be absorbed in it—a fact that’s doubly true of fiction, especially of novels. When you’re preoccupied with worry about your own life, it can be twice as hard to break away from your worries, from your bills, from the headlines and the state of the world, and plunge down between the covers. And while it can be harder to make the leap to escapism when it feels like there are lots of problems, lots of worries that you have to fix RIGHT NOW, it can be even more important to be able to do so, to stretch your imagination and consider other possibilities, what ifs or might have been, or simply to marvel at how big the universe out there is. There was a line in ‘The Man on the Ceiling’ (which I was gushing about a few weeks ago) that ‘stories are the masks of god’, and I think, when it comes to why we read fiction, or share stories with each other, that line strikes me as succinct and good a philosophy as any.

The middle of winter is also prime hibernation weather, even in good times. And as we all know, since the groundhog told us a couple of weeks back, it’s not likely to be an early spring. Not this year. Heck, there’s even a little snow coming down as I type this. So for myself, and for many of you out there, the dilemma: there’s the urge to pick up a book on the one hand, and on the other hand, there’s resistance, the inability to concentrate because you’re worried about your buddy who got laid off, or are wondering how you’re going to refinance your mortgage, or feel guilty every time you sit down and crack open the new Chabon because, hey, you really should be editing your resume to make sure there’s just a LITTLE more white space at the top of the page to showcase your chosen font. And then, in the middle of that, caught between the nesting-instinct and the worries, is the ambivalence, the sense of tossing and turning, not knowing which way to go. For the big choices, the life decisions, it can be agonizing. But for the little choices, it’s still quite frustrating.

All of this is a fancy way of saying that it’s been hard to give much time to reading the past week. And when reading becomes daunting, when you start to doubt you can focus for more than, say, thirty minutes at a time, and the stack of novels you’ve really been meaning to read starts to creep up to the obscene heights of your Uncle Alfie’s netflix cue, it may be time to stop and take a breather. I think there’s such a thing as reader’s block, just as much as there is a writer’s block. Hit me in university, once. In the summer, after exams, I tried to crack open three or four novels, and I couldn’t read a page. I was actually exhausted from all of the readings I’d been doing for work. It took me a month to be able to sit down and read for pleasure, again. A terrible month, that was. Glad it’s over now. The great thing about short stories? There’s no feeling of obligation to read them all at once. You can break them up into whatever sort of timetable you want. An entire book in an afternoon, two or three over a weekend, one a week, stretched out over several months—when it comes to short story collections, there’s all sorts of ways to fit them into your schedule, just as long as you read them.

The other thing I find interesting is that when it comes to short story collections—everybody’s got their favorite comfort food for times such as these. Some people love J.D. Salinger’s ‘Nine Stories’. Some go for Hemingway or Saki. Some prefer Flannery O’Connor over everybody else. For me, I’d have to say it’s Ray Bradbury. The past few weeks, I’ve been keeping an old, well-thumbed copy of ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’ on my bedside nightstand. The cover’s creased along the spine, and starting to threaten to come off, and the pages are yellowed, but despite its small size (167 pages!) and its fragility, it’s a collection that I treasure. January is a great time to revisit the lonely ‘Fog Horn’ with its prehistoric beast bellowing in the ocean depths, and the ‘Pedestrian’ out for a walk, who seems less like a victim and more like a prophet every year, for ‘The April Witch’ promising a Spring that might not look like what we imagined it to be, but is Spring nonetheless, for the heartbreaking mysterious Wilderness, and the Invisible Boy, which is the kind of story that you need to lift your spirits when headlines like the ones about the job cuts on Friday rolled out, let me tell you….the wise, sad Emperor and the Flying Machine, and the Murderer, who would make a nice partner in crime with the Pedestrian. They’re classic stories, short and saying just what they need to say, but although they don’t take long to read, they linger with you long after you finish them. What-ifs, maybes, whens and whereabouts. There are a dozen other stories in the collection I’ve yet to re-read, this go-round on the Bradbury Carousel. We’re all getting older; all of us, but the stories are as good as ever. Somehow, I think I’ll be reading just fine, regardless of the headlines, at February’s end.