A question of time

On my “yet-to-be-read” shelf I have Team of Rivals, The Clash of Civilizations, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s* Prisoners. I have a feeling that they will be sitting there for a while. My question is this: How do all of my contemporaries get so much damn reading done in comparison to my own woeful book count? Is it just a function of my having to do so much extra-curricular work (i.e., watching all 4.5 hours of Che on Sunday afternoon while the NFL playoffs are on, or going to see the Notorious B.I.G. biopic Notorious tonight) that I don’t have time for pleasurable reading? Am I just a slow reader? Do I not do enough skimming? Does everyone else just pretend to have read all these books that they claim to have read? Do I read too many magazine articles, thus eliminating a key reading time (lunchtime being when I consume my New Yorkers and Weekly Standards and Atlantics, for the most part)? Do I simply need to carve out a “reading time” that must be honored every evening? How do all you smart jerks get your reading done in a timely fashion?

*I’ve been slow to the Jeffrey Goldberg bandwagon for reasons that aren’t quite clear; posts like this one make me sad that I’ve been missing out.