As I've been awaiting reviews of Practically Shameless by various publications, I've been thinking about my own reading habits.

There was a time when I read a fair amount, both in print and listening to audio books while I commuted to work. (I should add that no matter how much time I've ever spent reading, it's never seemed like enough.)

These days I find it hard to read many books. I listen to a great deal of news on NPR, and that's a lot like reading. I subscribe to TIME and Newsweek magazines and read a fair number of the articles in them. I subscribe to my daily newspaper, the Longmont Times-Call, and I glance through some of its articles each day.

I think there are a number of reasons for this. Certainly lack of time is a big one, especially now that I'm self-employed and every minute is an opportunity to bring in work. Lack of money for buying books is another one, since I seem to need to write questions and comments for the author in the margins, which means I can't use library books.

Another reason that's been coming to me has been surprising: Some books I've read over the years have changed the course of my life. Perhaps, when that has happened, I've been too directionless, but there it is.

In 1975, I read a book by or about Thomas Paine. I don't remember how I got started, but I ended up reading everything he'd written and all the existing biographies of him. After coming to the opinion that the definitive biography had yet been written (and that most the previous biographies had been written by people who didn't like him), I decided to write that definitive biography myself. I even traveled to England to do research on his early life.

That decision changed the course of my life: I would become a writer of books about the founding fathers. As I wrote in Practically Shameless, I eventually gave up my plan to write the Paine biography, though I didn't stop dreaming of being a writer of books.

Something similar happened in the late 1990s: I read Fred Howard's biography of the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville. Rather, I listened to the book first on audio tapes, I think after my husband recommended them, and then bought the print book to read it again and see the photos. At the time I was writing screenplays as a hobby, and I wanted to write a screenplay for a film that would at last bring the Wrights' real story to the screen. Their story had been written many times for children, usually stopping in 1909, the year when things began to go wrong. Their story has a tragic ending that most people don't know about, and I thought it made an interesting statement on the impact of obsession, which is really what killed Wilbur in 1912. While working on the Wright screenplay, for nearly three years, I traveled to Greenfield Village in Michigan, where their home and bicycle shop stand, and to Dayton, Ohio, where the buildings originally stood.

To a lesser extent, reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung changed my life as well. I was already a Jungian by that time, so it's not that the book changed my beliefs. But I do remember quite distinctly picking up a torch. There's a passage in MDR where Jung says that he did his best to alert the world to the unconscious mind and must now leave the rest of the job to others. I was on a bus going to work, and I remember the moment quite vividly: The bus was traveling west on Golf Road and had just gone past the entrance to Highway 53. I was sitting on the righthand side of the bus looking out a north window at a seafood restaurant.

As I read what sounded like a request for volunteers, internally I raised a hand and said, "I'll do that."

I think what has happened for me in cases like these is that I've become so excited by the experience of reading that I allow it to infuse my life rather than letting the excitement slip away. Odd, though, that another choice would simply be to pick up another book.

As a child, I sometimes had an image of the faces of the world's authors hanging above me in the sky like giant bobble-heads. I wanted very much to join their ranks.

Practically Shameless is about the underlying reasons for resistance to change. How ironic that resisting major change to my life is one reason I don't read as many books as before.