Callum asked me recently, half joking, whether I’d ever timed it, the nightly reading thing, because he’s noticed I get twitchy if it gets interrupted too early, and I realized I genuinely didn’t know the actual number until I checked my phone’s screen-off timer against when I usually close a book, and it’s almost always somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five minutes. Not a chapter count, not a page goal, a duration, which I hadn’t consciously clocked until he made me look.
The lamp matters more than I’d have guessed if you’d asked me before I thought about it properly. It’s the same one from my last year of grad school, a cheap clip lamp that’s outlived two apartments and one entire relationship before this one, and I’ve had chances to replace it with something nicer and just haven’t, and I think it’s because the specific warm, slightly-too-yellow color it throws is load-bearing for the whole ritual now, the same way a smell can drop you back into a memory. Different lamp, different light, and some part of my brain apparently doesn’t fully believe it’s reading time.
No phone in the room is the actual rule, the one I enforce, everything else is soft. I don’t care what I’m reading, fiction, one of the denser nonfiction books I’ve reviewed here, doesn’t matter, and I don’t care if I only get through four pages some nights when I’m exhausted. The phone rule is the one thing I’ve never once broken in probably six years, since somewhere around when we moved to Asheville, and it’s the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice, if I’m being honest about it, forty minutes where the only demand on my attention is a fixed rectangle of paper that can’t notify me of anything.
I used to think this was just a preference, the way some people prefer tea to coffee. Writing it out like this, I think it’s closer to maintenance, the daily thing that keeps the rest of the reading, the actual reviewing, the noticing what’s specific and true in a sentence, functioning at all. Take away the forty minutes for long enough and I get a specific kind of irritable I don’t get from much else, which is a strange thing to learn about yourself only in your thirties.