I’d rather be reading right now…
I’m not even joking, I’d much rather be reading right now. I’m knee-deep in 5 books at the moment, and they deserve some of my attention.
I have my reasons
Listen, I know it sounds unhinged, but I have good reasons for reading 5 books at the same time:
- The Hacienda, by Isabel Cañas – I didn’t check what this book was actually about, and I just put it on my wish list. Turns out, it’s a horror story. I can only read it for 5 minutes in the morning.
- To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han – But in Italian, so it’s more language practice than reading for fun. So it doesn’t count, right?
- Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates – Listen, there’s only so much real life accounts of extreme misogyny a person can take before needing a break. More than 15 minutes of reading this book at a time will make me scream.
- The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon – I really have no excuse as to why this is going so slow. I keep having to consult the map provided to understand where the story is taking place. It’s work. It’s hard.
- Sunshine over Bluebell Castle, by Sarah Bennett – Okay this is an audio book, which is for my morning commute and my daily walks with the dog. Safer than trying to walk while reading, so in my opinion, it’s just good sense.
So if you ask me, I’m not even actively reading one book. Not so unhinged now, am I right?
Giving up on books
Okay, back to the point I wanted to make. Which is not so much about the quantity of books I read at any given moment, but more so about the genres of books I like to read. For years I read books I didn’t enjoy because I thought I needed to read “better” books, in stead of simply reading books I liked. For years, I’ve spent money on books I thought I should be reading, only to open them, read a chapter or two, and then put them away indefinitely. I very nearly gave up on books altogether, because I wasn’t finding any joy in reading. And for someone whose entire personality was books from ages 2-22, that was a tiny bit of a struggle. I always say that reading is one of my favourite things to do, which was definitely true then, and is true again now.
It wasn’t true of a few years, simply because I was trying to read books I didn’t like. For literally no other reason than “well the people I surround myself with are reading these books so I should read them too”. Doing things simply because other people are doing them? Bad idea. Well, unless the thing they’re doing is running away from a fire. If you see people running away from a fire you should absolutely do as they do.
Competitive, overly ambitious overachiever
Jokes aside, it took a whole-ass pandemic to get me back to reading regularly. With not much else to do, I turned to books I used to love and re-read them.
It started with a book that traumatised me: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. I read it in high school, and I swear, towards the end of the book I was sobbing so hysterically, my mom had to take the book from me and offer me tea and a cookie. But I loved it. To this day, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and it is always in my top 5 whenever someone asks me what my favourite book is. So I re-read it. And I loved it just as much as I did when I was a teenager. And it reminded me of my love of historical fiction. I set out in search of more historical fiction, and someone recommended Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, which was one of the most heart wrenching books I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it.
Little by little, book by book, I started to love reading again. And because I’m nothing if not competitive against myself, I kept a log of how many books I read on Goodreads. And to my surprise, I exceeded my personal goal by 1 book. Being the overachiever I am, I doubled my reading goal for the next year. Which was over-ambitious, but still, I kept reading.
And I found out that I never stopped loving books. I just needed to re-discover my favourites.
MelodyTalks 