A fellow librarian colleague, Stacey Rattner, who I’ve mentioned in the past and I presented last month about how our reading lives as librarians affect our students’ reading lives. We asked questions to think-pair-share about and then coupled them with reading recommendations.

During one of these sections, we talked about having time/making time to read and Stacey shared that I read during my lunch period. Yes. Every day I read during my lunch period. Other than when my intern and I were eating together this fall or if I can’t take my lunch for some reason, you’ll find me with my feet on the opposite chair, eating my snack, and reading. And it was recently reinforced when I was listening to the audiobook Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee that what I’m doing has work and personal benefits similar to this BBC article from 2019 that also references how brain breaks at work lead to happier employees and feelings of productivity. I didn’t start doing this because of these reinforcing studies, I did it because I knew it would help me detach for a brief time in the middle of the day and do something I loved. It resets me and I started sharing on my public Instagram my lunch time reading it, using the hashtag #literarylunchbox. They tend to be graphic novels or short nonfiction that I can either read in a period or over a few days.

Here are some of the titles I’ve read recently during my lunch period:

What do you do during your lunch break?