Lynn showed me some drawings by our daughter when she was a child. That daughter died more than 10 years ago but the drawings show what our kid experienced of her family at the time. There are the woman, her sister and herself doing things and there is the dad reading. Some guys carve, some guys write, some guys repair and some guys read. I do other things besides read but I do read. I don't exactly see how people can avoid diving into a book every so often, since there is a wide variety of books available.
We have been married for more than 60 years and in the first few months of our marriage, I read aloud to Lynn. We were enjoying the comic novels of Peter DeVries and I wanted to be there when she heard some of the jokes and puns. Now, each of us is in a book club and they tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction so we alternate what gets read aloud, too.
Books tend to take a week or more to read aloud so once we settle on a book that we both like, we are relieved from searching and deciding and agreeing for a while. With tv and movies, there is even less non-fiction so most of what we watch is fiction. We like a good series that we can more or less settle into and watch regularly. It is surprisingly important how long the episode runs. 45 minutes is a convenient length but many shows and movies run twice that long or longer.
Over the years, we have gotten into Foyle's War, Doc Martin, Wings and others. But I have noticed that we get into a series and get comfortable with the characters and the quality of the story takes 2nd or 3rd place once we are "in". For either books or movies, searching and deciding can be a bother and a pain, not big ones but they matter.
