As is always the case at the end of the year, people start posting about the various challenges and resolutions they made, and whether or not they succeeded in their crusades. Because I’m on Goodreads, I get to see if my friends managed to complete their reading resolutions for the year. Curious, I went to check my own number, and with a slight sense of shock, I discovered that I had only read 15 books in 2021. I was averaging about a book a month. For comparison, I read 31 books in 2019 – my reading total had shrunk by 50% in just 2 years.
How could I go from reading so much, to so little?
The obvious answer is the pandemic. The world isn’t what it was in 2019, and with my mind constantly plagued by incessant bad news and stresses of a changing workplace, I found it harder to read. After all, reading requires effort and investment; you need to sink yourself in the world the author creates for you, letting the words guide your imagination. It is a far easier task to binge watch TV shows, or throw on a film, where the worlds are ready-made for you to stroll through.
As I shared my bleak book count with my husband, he was, predictably, less surprised than I was. “You don’t buy books anymore,” he said as he munched on some prawn crackers, playing some obscure video game on his computer. He was right. I had book vouchers for my birthday that year, and felt more trepidation than jubilation. I spent hours in the book store, paralysed by all the choices, unable to feel excitement for anything I perused, finally spending my vouchers on a bunch of stationery because I just didn’t want to be there anymore. Like the biggest drama queen that ever was, I cried when I got home after that failed shopping trip.
How could something I enjoyed so much now bring me so much anxiety?
It was the same experience at Christmas. I received more books from family and friends, books that I brought home and stacked on my shelf, which only added to my worries – look at all these books I would never read.
And then, there was an imperceptible shift, or maybe a Christmas miracle. A friend of mine kept texting me about a book she wanted to read, which was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. Apparently the book had gained TikTok popularity, so everyone was reading it and as a result, she was unable to borrow it from the library. Seeing someone possess such exhilaration about a book made me smile, and on a whim, I bought two copies of the book when I passed by a bookstore in town. One for her, one for me.
I gave her the book when we met up for lunch and coffee, and stacked mine on my bookshelf with all the other books I haven’t read. My friend was so excited she started reading the book immediately, and would text me her thoughts about said book from time to time, or photos of herself with the book on various modes of public transportation. It was an infectious joy that triggered my curiosity, because I couldn’t respond to any of her insights as I hadn’t read it myself. I desperately wanted to be part of the conversation, so I took It Ends With Us down from the shelf and began to read.
Despite reading Hoover’s books before, I had forgotten how addictive they are. There’s a certain tension in the way she frames things, and this desire to know carries you through the book. I finished the book in a few hours, responded to my friend’s questions about the book, and hopped onto Goodreads to see what else Colleen Hoover had in her arsenal. This led me to Ugly Love, and Verity – the latter I absolutely recommend – before I started reading other books by other authors.
When 2022 came upon us, Goodreads reminded me to set my own reading challenge for the year. I was tempted not to, because a big part of me felt like this momentum couldn’t be sustained – I would bow out eventually, so why put all that pressure on myself? The point isn’t to read so many books just because I have to; I just wanted to enjoy reading again. But I figured that a goal gave me something to work towards, so I keyed in the number before turning my attention to the latest book in my hands.
It was when I reached my third book of 2022 that I found it again: my love for reading. As my eyes eagerly devoured page after page, I felt my heart race, my tears painting a merry rain dance down my face while I burrowed my feet into the cushions of my chair. When I was done, I closed the book, embraced it tightly, feeling whole again.
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