Reading habits
Sustained silent reading
aka my home life entering
the dimly lit classroom
before headphones loudly
blared memorized lyrics
strenuous thoughts quelled
for a quick fifteen minutes
blissfully unaware to eyes
of peers wandering around
pages thick with promise
each turn in anticipation
now the silence demands
purpose, review, reasons
unplugging feels impossible
despite the worlds written
before you
Similar to writing, reading is often looked at in terms of purpose. When you’re one of the kids who spends their spare time reading, you’re looked at as weird. Then you’re an adult who reads for fun while your counterparts complain about reading for homework assignments. Once you’re past the academic threshold you defined, reading can become a chore.
There’s no time or space to read because of life obligations. Then there’s that pressure to keep up with what everyone else is reading (despite them not giving your habits a second look). For me, the up and down has always been present. I used to devour fiction and YA with ease growing up. I didn’t have to talk when I was reading. Writing book reports or summaries came with ease.
I’ve written multiple times about how I prefer writing to speaking and reading kind of falls in the same category. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I fall down YouTube or TikTok rabbit holes like everyone else, but there’s something about reading that gives me a different feeling.
Over the past year, I’ve been writing book reviews for a publication that made my reading selections much more intentional. I wanted to only review poetry collections and get back into reading poetry at a level closer to my grad school experience. This made reading fall back into the purpose category. I had to read for the next pitch to review then keep the list going. It kept me organized but I wasn’t reading anything else. It started becoming less enjoyable so I started going over my unread book shelf.
Something I struggle with, aside from accumulating more books when I clearly have to be read piles, is that I felt I always had to finish a book even if I didn’t like it. Trudging through pages takes me back to required reading in school. There were two poetry books on my shelf I got for free from a bin at a book festival a few years ago that I attempted to dive into. You can get a vibe pretty early on whether you’re going to like a book, like watching trailers for movies or first seasons of television shows, and I was not feeling these titles.
So, I did something different, I stopped reading. I closed the books and took them to a free little library. The initial guilt faded when I knew someone else would have the opportunity to enjoy them. And I didn’t have to endure something I didn’t like because who was going to force me to read these books? This led to me perusing the Kindle store for a new eBook to read and it took starting around four books before I decided on a new book that I just finished (and it’s the first part of a series so I lucked out there!)
Perhaps the bottom line being: if you don’t like the book, you can move on to the next one.