You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

I have this daydream where I go to the park and read under a tree.

The sun is shining.

The temperature is not too hot, but not chilly either.

The ground beneath me is comfortable.

I have snacks on hand.

I'm hydrated.

And I am captivated by the book in front of me.

It doesn't usually pan out like this. In reality, two minutes in, I'm sweating, my butt

hurts from sitting on tree roots, I realize I forgot the snacks, and I can't focus. So I close

the book, go home, turn on the TV. A lot of us make this mistake when it comes to reading. We think

it should feel romantic, like this landmark event in our day. You know, we have this imagination

that like, oh, reading time is like this luxurious thing. I'm in my armchair, sipping scotch.

Kevin Wynn is the author of the novel's My Documents and New Waves. And in 2017, he wrote an article for GQ called How to Read a Whole Damn Book Every Week. You have to make it a more regular habit than that. Because if you just wait for all those times when you're drinking scotch, hopefully don't drink that much scotch. Hope you read more than you drink scotch. But yeah, if you wait for all those moments, you're never going to finish a book. Whether your reading daydreams involve you at the park, in an armchair, at a lakeside retreat, or on the beach, what if you let those go and allowed yourself to read whenever, wherever?

Because you don't want to miss out. Reading is a joy.

Mary Ann Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA,

an author of Reader Come Home,

The Reading Brain in a Digital World.

An author gives us a chance to leap into the lies and thoughts and feelings of others,

a chance to leap into thoughts that we've never had before,

and a chance to even appreciate that in the midst of solitude, we are not alone.

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