Growing up, I was a pretty voracious reader of books thanks, in part, to the reading programs available at the time; Reading is Fundamental, SRA, Bookmobiles, and Libraries. I can remember spending afternoons in the main library in my city north of Boston reading about sports legends, effectively combining two things I loved doing. Later, as a History major in college with a predilection for taking Russian Literature courses, my love of reading helped me to keep up (my procrastination was a powerful oppositional force but that’s a much longer topic). Today I struggle to read books. I have four in various stages at the moment. I used to find it easy to concentrate on books, get lost in them actually. Now I find myself distracted by any shiny object served up to me by my phone or iPad (this may be part of the problem as most of my reading is on my iPad). I listened to an interesting rebroadcast of a podcast by the Ezra Klein this morning titled, “This is Your Brain on Deep Reading.  It’s Pretty Magnificent.” I’ve decided to be more disciplined about reading (first thing in the day is good) and perhaps also, get actual books from the library, and thus reducing the number of shiny objects competing for my attention. I’ll let you know how that works.  More later…