Before this job I read the way I think most people do, a chapter or two before bed, maybe a long stretch on a weekend if a book had really hooked me. Six years of overnight shifts has replaced that with something stranger, reading in whatever window actually opens up, ten minutes here, forty minutes there if it’s a genuinely slow night, and I’ve had to relearn what kind of book actually survives being read this way versus what kind of book just falls apart into confusion by the third interruption.

Dense, structurally difficult books, the Bateson especially, turned out to actually suit the schedule better than I expected, since a lot of Steps to an Ecology of Mind is essays rather than a continuous narrative, so a forty minute window is enough to actually finish a discrete thought before the next intake comes through the door. What doesn’t survive the schedule at all is a book that depends on holding a huge cast of characters actively in your head, I tried River of Gods on shift for a while and kept losing the thread between characters across a three day gap between reading sessions, and eventually gave up and finished it entirely on two consecutive days off instead, cover to cover, the way I used to read everything.

The other change, less obvious until I actually sat down to think about it for this, is that I’ve started rereading first pages a lot more than I used to. Coming back to a book after a shift where something genuinely rough happened, I’ll often reread the last few pages I was on before continuing, not because I’ve forgotten the plot exactly, more because my head wasn’t fully in the room the first time through and I want to actually be present for it the second time. That habit would have felt like wasted time on a normal schedule. Now it feels like the only way to actually read instead of just moving my eyes across a page while thinking about something else entirely.

I used to feel a little embarrassed about how fragmented my reading has become, like I was doing it wrong compared to people who can sit with a book for three uninterrupted hours. I’ve mostly let that go now. The fragmented way isn’t worse, it’s just a different tool for a different schedule, and if anything it’s made me pickier and more honest about which books actually reward attention versus which ones just want you to keep turning pages fast enough not to notice they’re thin.

Six years in, I don’t think I’d go back to reading the old way even if my schedule flipped tomorrow. This one’s slower, and it’s taught me more about what I’m actually reading for.