After doing some spring cleaning over the last few weeks, I have found that I had a stack of books on various topics that I had meant at one point to read. I also decided that I would like to actually read most of them, but am finding that I have a relatively weak "sit and read muscle". Looking back I’m not all that surprised by this fact, though I am a little annoyed with myself because of it (and determined to fix it). This does however seem to only be effect non-fiction reading.
Its not so much that my "sit and read muscle" is weak that annoys me, rather how “natural” most other forms of "sit and < activity>" tends to feel. I probably couldn’t count the number of times that I just sat and watched TV, in fact I often found I needed to put effort into stopping. At first I thought this might be a passive vs. active participation thing, until I thought about gaming. Since I was young I can remember periods where I would sit in front of the TV/computer and going 5-10 hours without ever moving, outside of the hand/finger motions required to control the game.
In fact about the only “sit and <activity> muscle” that is as weak is my “sit and writing muscle”. I suspect that the reasons behind the two are rather similar, likely related to how much active thought needs to go into. I suspect that part of it is tied to the fact that productive thinking tends to generate physical energy for me, which is why my leg tends to shake when I am in the zone programming. This would seem to fit with the problem, since generally the biggest obstacle to both reading and writing human languages (English) is a urge to get up and move which slowly increases in intensity.
I think to test this theory; I will try doing more reading on my exercise bike. Hopefully it will work since that would be a good amount of paper to have wasted by not reading them. It will also have the added benefit of more exercise.
