I get one real break during a shift, and it lands somewhere around two in the morning depending on how the night’s going, and for going on nine years now that break has meant the same folding chair in the same break room with whatever book’s currently living in my bag. Not every night, some nights it’s twenty minutes of actual sleep with my head against the wall instead, but reading is the default, and it’s the only reading time I’ve got that’s genuinely mine, no chores waiting, no Renata needing something, just the radio somebody left on low and however many pages I can get through before break’s over.
It’s a strange way to read a book, in these small twenty-minute increments spread across however many nights it takes, and I know it changes how I experience a story compared to somebody who sits down and reads for three hours straight on a Sunday. I lose momentum sometimes, have to flip back a page to remember where a scene left off. But there’s also something to reading this slow that I’ve come to actually value, you sit with a chapter longer than you would otherwise, because it’s genuinely all you’re going to get of it until tomorrow night.
I’ve tried audiobooks during the actual work part of the shift, plenty of guys on the crew do it, earbud in while running the floor scanner, and it just doesn’t work for me the same way. I need my attention fully on the freight when I’m moving it, forklift traffic and pallet weights aren’t things I can half-listen through, so audio during work hours was always more distraction than company. The paperback in the bag stays for the one window where my attention’s actually free.
Renata asked me once why I don’t just read at home before bed instead, since I’m home plenty of hours during the day when she’s at work. Tried that for a stretch. Didn’t stick, mostly because daytime, at home, awake on a night-shift schedule, is when I’m doing everything else, sleeping enough to function, the actual chores, occasionally seeing another human being who isn’t asleep at the hours I’m awake. The break room at two a.m. isn’t competing with anything else for that time slot. It’s carved out, protected, mine in a way home time during the day never quite manages to be.
Some of the books that end up reviewed here took me three weeks this way, twenty minutes a night, which by anyone else’s math is a slow reader. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as the only genuinely quiet twenty minutes most of my nights actually have, and I’d rather spend it reading slow than not reading at all.