Reading and Time

Trying to find time to read these days. Time and energy to concentrate seem to be hard to come by. I did notice my reading habits from college and graduate school are not a great help when you work full time and have other obligations. Taking 7 books to a coffee shop for four hours or so just isn't feasible anymore. For some reason, this has taken me a long time to figure out, so that I've been taking, say, 4 books down to a coffee shop, knowing full well I had an hour and a half and 50 essays to grade. Hmm. Aaaanyway. I put down my pen, stopped speed reading, and decided to take it one book at a time. The problem now being I have 40 or so books on my shelf of which I have read roughly 30 pages. The pattern goes something like this. I get a new book, I take it along with three others to a coffee shop, read 30 or so pages, move to the next book, read 30 or so pages, move to the next book, do some journaling, stare out the window, reflect, get a phone call, go home, get busy for two weeks, get interested in new books either online or through recommendations, buy them, start over. I guess, in adult life, slow and steady wins the race. I picked up Gogol's Dead Souls, being an aficionado of 19th century Russian Lit. with its psychology, philosophy, theology, history, its passion and depth, its redemptive suffering. Gogol strikes a different tone. I'm not far into the book, but there is a sense of Gogol sketching archetypes of Russian society and playfully mocking them. The main character, Chichikov, is not the most sympathetic, and so we don't always identify with him, which creates a sense of detachment from the whole affair. I find myself identifying more closely with this tone than perhaps some of the more redemptive and "Romantic" depictions of life in other literature, but so far, it's too much my own way of seeing, that I'm not stretched into new perspectives, part of the joy of literature. Granted, it's still early on in the novel, but it makes me consider a point about the writer's voice. As a wannabe writer, I'm constantly looking for kind of writing mentors when I read. As a result I'm constantly pulled this way and that, impressed by many different kinds of good writing. Recently, someone told me to "tell your own truth," which was empowering, but here I come to a conflict. The kind of work I value points toward redemption, it sacralizes, it transcends. My own tendency, however, is to mock, criticize, point out incongruity, to strike a less hopeful tone. On the other hand, I'm tired of cynicism in myself and others. In her new book "Reading like a writer," Francine Prose quotes someone (Nabakov? I can't remember) saying basically that "whoever you are, whatever your prejudices, whatever substance you are made of will invariably show up in your writing. What if there's a gap between who you are and the kind of stories and worldviews you see as necessary, valuable, etc.? Maybe the world needs more Dostoevsky, less Gogol. Thoughts?