The Butt Ugly Weblog

Reading like it's 1999

As a teenager, I was a voracious reader. And this continued actually for a pretty long time, but it became more difficult over time. Many have complained about the same thing, and I see a lot of answers: social media, streaming, kids, work, other pressures of daily life... Sure. They all contribute. And I've been saying the same things about my own reading. But I wanted to see if they actually were true for me. So as my summer holiday started this year, I just decided to read as many books as I could and see, if I still can and want to.

I know a lot of people prefer audio books these days, but for me they just don't work. My brain is wired so that I quite often pause to wonder about a passage, or it triggers some memory, or I start daydreaming, or I make notes about it for a role playing campaign. With a book, all I have to do is to lift my eyes from the page, and when my thought is complete, I can just lower my eyes and continue reading from where I left off. Not so with audio books. With audio books, I just lose the passage, the narrative and everything, and while I sort of complete the act of reading/listening to the book, I find that I have missed half of it and have only a generic idea as to what happened in the book.

Having said that, I did listen to one audio book during the summer, which was a pretty cool experience. I went on a walk, then I borrowed the book from the library on my phone, listened to it, and then returned it before I got home. (Edith Södergran's poetry. Poetry is always hard to listen to, since so much depends on the delivery. This was a good audiobook though.)

Aaanyway. During July and August, I was able to read 17 books, ranging from poetry and high fantasy to military fiction and business literature. During holiday, reading was a bit faster, but even after returning to work I was able to read pretty much all I wanted. I started off light, borrowing just one book from the library, and now I am in a state where I have five books checked out from the library and I'm pretty confident I can finish them all within the month. (Yes, one is missing from the pic.)

What I found out was that the reason I had not been able to read as much before as I wanted to was... lack of practice. My skills of reading had simply rusted due to low usage. I started off easy, reading pageturner, not-much-thinking-required books in my native language, just to see when and where I can read. So instead of doomscrolling, I read during breakfast. I read a quarter of an hour here and there. I made the book easily available. I read before bedtime. And my skills returned. I got into more complicated books (Harry Martinson's Aniara especially was quite emotionally heavy) as reading again became effortless like it was during my youth.

This experiment has made me a lot happier and relaxed than before. I've missed reading and books so much.

So I suppose here's a lesson: If you want to read more, give it a try? It might be just rust, and you might not know it until you try. Worked for me; might work for you.