The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart

If there is one way to predict how bad Internet addiction is, just start by hanging out with a bunch of readers. We all bemoan our fate of too much "Facebook" etc. All the time.

And wouldn't you know.. 

FaceBOOK is like a book. With real characters that just happen to be the protagonists and antagonists in your own story. How could you go wrong?? Multiple settings, story arcs, my God it's a library right on your techno device. What's not to like?

We discussed the barriers to our reading and it always turns to this problem. The Net. And since then I have seen a few of my book friends turn to new goals, and they have been very good at keeping them. One makes sure she reads so many pages per night, one makes sure her entire Web sources are locked down and some just left and haven't returned. That's not true, they left and came back with three read books under their belt. 

I was insanely jealous. 

Focusing on time to read is hard for me, every day I wake up and say, I am going to read, end of story. What do I do? Check out the online world, news, favorite book blogs, regular blogs, Twitter, etc and then I log off and curl up with a book. Then I nod off immediately. My brain has had enough reading, time to tune out, and I do. Book falls to floor and I take a great nap. Unfortunately, I wake up to say out loud, "how the hell can I have a book blog to write for and not read??"

The book I posted, The Winter of our Disconnect, is a book I picked up a while back. Wait, no, I bought it so quickly when I found it in the book store I nearly killed myself trying to get home to read the whole thing in one sitting. It was one of those books that pushed me to clean out the superfluous crap of my online life. I set about to go online briefly and get off in one hour so I could read. It worked for awhile but it was too difficult for me to maintain. I wanted to be Susan Maushart. I really did. However, I think about this book every. single. day, does that count? No.

I want to be free from the hassles of logging on, if Susan Maushart can do this, so can I. Well. I can certainly try.

What the book is about:

An American, Susan Maushart, and her children live on the west coast of Australia.  I believe she is freshly divorced from her Aussie husband (that part is fuzzy) and going at it as a single mom. Situations pushed her into making a decision. No online life. For ONE year. One year. Can you imagine her kids and what they had to say? She pushed it to the nth degree, and the outcome was not only entertaining, well thought out and encouraging, but honest, an honest push to look at your own addictions. Even if one cannot commit the way she did, we can certainly have days where we think of her extraordinary efforts and cheer our own selves on to take a day off for a book, a game, a walk, time with family, friends, that place that's called, Real Life. That thing that seems to be boring compared to our online lives. 

I apologize for the crude review, but I think it speaks volumes. Get offline and live. Read. Find time to enjoy your life. Everyone will be online when you get back. I promise (I swear Internet people never leave, they simply cannot which, in turn, makes them the best of people who wait for you when you go on sabbaticals, my people are phenomenal with this, very forgiving..) Set goals, read eleven pages a night, throw your phones and tablets in another room and sit down with a nice cup of tea and read. 

The feeling I experience when I go off the Grid: overwhelmingly wonderful. It's work to make time for a book, it didn't used to be, but it is. That is how our lives are now, hard and very distracted while living most of the time on the Grid. So we must work around it. Not rage against it as most of us want to do, but to put all things in perspective and actually take time off. 

See how you do, I am going to do it myself, I need to catch up on many books that are silently, patiently waiting for me. And I can't wait to meet up with them.

Buy it and keep it by your side, and then go out and buy all your Interwebz friends the book and tell them to never ever lose it.