What is the best time of year to read?

My average reading pace is about a novel a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. As you can tell from my handle I like to spend a lot of time outside. Most of the time this cuts into my reading time. Let's face it. In the winter, when the sun sets at 5 pm I'm a lot more likely to sit down earlier in the evening and start reading. However, in the summer when the sun doesn't set until 9pm; I start reading much later in the evening.

Since I'm kind of a dork I keep track of everything I have read during a given year on a spreadsheet. I have this spreadsheet broke into different months. Looking at my tally's so far this year there is distict decrease in reading when the weather warms up. In May of this year I only read two novels.

But given this theory why did I put away 6 novels in the month of July. Granted some of them were only 250 pages; thank you Clive Cussler. But I also read "To the Last Man" which is 650 pages of small print. As I thought about my reading habits I realized it's not so much what the weather is doing, it's how much time I have to read. During July I went on vacation, had an entire weekend without kids, and of course the Fourth of July Holiday.

It also doesn't hurt that I have been reading some book that are hard to put down; including The Appeal by John Grisham, and The Ezekiel Option by Joel Rosenberg.

I also read The Last Patriot by Brad Thor. TLP is my favorite book so far this year, and I beleive it's Mr Thor's best novel so far. The best way to describe it to you is imagine Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne, and Dan Brown's Robert Langdon in the same novel working toward the same goal. I had a hard time putting this book down and with everything going on in my life, wife, kids, job I knocked it out in 48 hours.

I need to bounce I just started my first James Patterson book, Along came a Spider.