IN this tumblr post be Austin Kleon, he quoted an article where someone talks about reading Proust while in prison.

The people I know of who’ve read a stupendous amount of books in a certain period of time have lived in a kind of sparse, prison-like existence. When the depression hit, Joseph Campbell moved to a shack outside of Woodstock, New York, and read nine hours a day for five years. When I[Austin Kleon] was 20, I spent 6 months in Cambridge, England living in a room the size of a broom closet, and that’s when I read Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce, etc. At one point, Genis’s father tells him to read Ulysses in prison, because “he wouldn’t have the willpower to get through it once he became a free man.” My friend was in the Peace Corps for two years in Africa, and he said all there was to do at night was smoke weed and read. He read a couple hundred books.

I can relate to that. When I did an internship at the Seattle Repertory Theater as part of my graduate work, I rented a bedroom in a house. All I had was a mattress, CD player, a drafting table, a Wind up alarm clock and books. Lots of books. I read over 50 books in that three month period. A lot of art history, John Irving, and Dickens. Besides missing Ann, it was a great time. Taking pictures of seattle, exploring the city, painting and reading.