I recently read this article by Roger Ebert, and it stuck a chord with .me. It is about his love of books. Real physical non “e” books. Mr. Ebert begins by talking about how content he was in university housing with few creature comforts and books:

“What do I really need that isn’t here in this room?” I asked. “Its dimensions are a little more than twice as wide and deep as I am tall. I don’t know, maybe 150 square feet? Here I have the padded wood chair in which I sit tilted against the wall, my feet braced on my straight desk chair. I am holding the three-inch-thick Paul Hamlyn edition of Shaw’s complete plays. This room contains: A wood single bed, an African blanket covering it, a wood desk and its gooseneck lamp, a small dresser with a mirror over it, my portable typewriter, a small wardrobe containing my clothes, a steamer trunk serving as a coffee table, and two bookcases, filled to overflowing. What more do I actually need?”

This reminded me of my brief stint in Seattle while doing an internship at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. I went to Seattle without Housing lined up, but promised a temporary place on another intern’s couch. After a week of searching I found a place in Fremont neighborhood. I had one small room with a borrowed mattress and drafting table and a secondhand lamp. I had a wind-up Alarm clock and portable CD player to cover my other needs. Once I didn’t need to spend my free time looking for a place to live, I was able to explore the city more. I would leave the Seattle Rep’s paint shop at 4:30, after having started at 8am. I would have my camera, a book and a soda in my backpack and go looking around. One of the things I quickly discovered some great used bookstores. So over the course of my 2 1/2 months in seattle I read 50 books (and had to ship them back to South Carolina). Half were fiction and the other half were non-fiction mostly Time-Life art history books.

If you think of simplifying your life, that was definitely one of the times I lived the simplest. I don’t know if I could go back to that, but I wish I could have that amount of reading time again. I discovered that once the school year starts I only read for fun over christmas break and over the summer. Otherwise it is just stuff I read for work. Some of that can be fun, like the plays I read for class or ones we think about producing.

But there is something different about reading something just because you want to. I think I need to carve out more time to that.