For most of my life, I didn’t entirely believe in the idea of the reading slump. I suspect that, like so many things, the concept took form with the social internet, when we could easily complain to each other about those times we just didn’t feel like reading, or couldn’t bring ourselves to pick up a book, or were too distractable to settle into the kind of focus that reading requires. If you weren’t feeling it in the pre-blog era, you just didn’t read for a while.
At this point, the existence of said slumps is a given. As with any reading-related issue, there are endless lists of helpful hints for getting out of reading slumps, lists of books guaranteed to break a slump, and other assorted discussions aplenty. A reading slump is a thing to dread, to avoid, to break as soon as possible. With so many books to read, how can you allow yourself to stop for a while?
If you’re willing to ask yourself a question like that, though, maybe it’s time to accept the slump.
When I was younger, I had no idea that books—that reading—could be a form of fandom. I didn’t know what fandom was for a long time, either; I grew up in the ’80s in rural Oregon without a TV. I didn’t even really understand that authors were living people just like everyone else. I hadn’t the foggiest that Beverly Cleary and Ursula K. Le Guin lived in the same town as my father. It would never have occurred to me to wonder where they lived.
It’s almost hard to imagine growing up in book fandom the way people do now, with access to authors on Twitter and tours (virtual or, someday, in person again) and all of the way authors are expected to make themselves accessible: writing personal essays, maintaining an online presence, being a personality as well as a writer. It’s also hard to imagine growing up with the ways in which that fandom, that love, has been commodified and packaged, even for something as broad as “books.”
What I do know—from being a music obsessive kid, from being a nerd, from growing up on Star Wars—is what it’s like to identify with the things you love so much that they become part of your personality, your identity, and the lens through which you see the world. “[x thing] is not a substitute for a personality” is a meme now, and often a cruel one. It’s an efficient way to diminish a person: attacking them via the things they love, telling them that love isn’t valid.
But loving a thing and demonstrating, performing, displaying your love for that thing—these things can be decoupled. They can go hand in hand, but they don’t have to. And sometimes, it’s better to separate them for a little bit, to tuck your love for a thing into a safe pocket and let it relax, let it take a break, let it exist outside of others’ view. Sometimes it’s good for it to just be yours for a minute.
This, I think, is one kind of reading slump, especially for those of us who are very online book people. Sometimes not reading is really about not participating in online bookish culture, which can be overwhelming and weirdly competitive, and can frequently make a person feel like some kind of failure simply because there is no way to read all the things they think they ought to read. The bookternet is often a wonderful place, full of connections and good memes and brilliant recommendations, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all need breaks sometimes. The book challenges, the reading lists, the 100 [insert genre] books you need to read before you die, the next hot thing, the hot thing from last year that you never got around to: Walk away from all of them. Put down the e-reader. Fire up Netflix. Remember how freeing it is to simply not have an opinion about a thing.
This is not, of course, every reading slump. But if this is the kind you’re in, then rolling a die to pick your next read, or reading the first 10 pages of six random books—these things aren’t going to help. They’re just going to make you feel more cramped and behind. Go find whatever else it is you like to do and do that for a little while. It doesn’t matter if that other thing is just “rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender from the beginning for the seventh time.” Do it. You need it. You need to feed your brain with something else for a little while, to re-create space for loving to read.
Buy the Book
A Marvellous Light
The kind of reading slump that made me believe in the phenomenon was another kind, and one I’ve heard a lot of people went through: The spring/summer 2020 reading slump.
In March of 2020, I watched 94 episodes of television. In June? One hundred and fifteen. I’ve talked a little about this before: All I wanted, while the world took on a new shape around us, was to watch people being very stressed out in space. I didn’t want comforting stories. I didn’t want books, my lifelong source of comfort, at all.
Probably everyone who experienced this particular slump sees it in a different way, whether it was a matter of shattered attention span, anxiety, fear, grief, uncertainty, or any overwhelming, painful mix of these. For me, reading was too normal last spring. It was too much a thing I’d done through everything else in my life, and I couldn’t do it through the start of the pandemic, which was utterly unlike anything else. I couldn’t find solace in escaping into magical lands or onto a spaceship, at least not on the page. Everything in reality was just too goddamn weird.
You also have to let this kind of slump run its course, or you may find yourself picking up books, reading five pages, and leaving them face-down in increasingly precarious positions around your house, never finishing anything, just building small traps for yourself to stumble over. I slowly crept out of last year’s slump by reading things I didn’t usually read, mostly nonfiction. Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia feels like something I dreamt. Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey felt like it was about everything. Ada Calhoun’s St. Marks Is Dead took me back to a city I used to call home, a block I used to live on, and gave me a reminder that cycles of life and growth and change continue, often regardless of what goes on around them.
Switching up genres is one of those oft-repeated suggestions for getting out of a slump. If last year taught me anything, though, it’s that what gets a given person out of a slump is as varied as the combination of feelings that pushes them into it in the first place. Maybe your solution is a new genre, a new author, a graphic novel instead of a memoir, a retelling of a story you already know you love. And maybe it’s just depriving yourself of books for a few days, or even weeks. Every relationship needs a breather sometimes, especially the ones with which we shape ourselves.
But if you often find yourself in a phase where nothing satisfies you, I have one suggestion: Set aside a book you haven’t read yet by an author you love. A sort of “break glass in case of emergency” book. When you are dissatisfied with everything and can’t settle on anything and are afraid that any book you pick up is going to be a letdown, then and only then do you crack that set-aside book. My version of this is never catching up on Helen Oyeyemi books. There always has to be one I haven’t read yet, just in case I need it. And I definitely needed Gingerbread this week.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
I am possibly not quite as involved in the “book world” as much as some so I don’t feel this pressure quite as much. But I will confess that being on GoodReads does increase my anxiety slightly when I’m not keeping up with my yearly goal pace. I try and ignore that though. I don’t want to rush through books or read books simply to hit a number.
Sometimes (like now!) I am spending more time on TV (Downton for the first time!). So if that means I take a few weeks to get through my current (Anna Karenina re-read), then so be it. I don’t *need* to read a certain number of books a week to be happy.
I do love your idea of having a “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency” book. I need to figure out which book that might be. I’ve tended to treat Austen novels that way, but most sadly there are a limited number of those. I only have 3 remaining. Not sure which other author I can trust implicitly…I shall have a think. Thanks for the thoughtful essay.
I found myself re-reading so much last year- comfort books for the win! I still have a bunch of last year’s purchases in my virtual Mount Tsundoku, just waiting for me to get to them.
Sometimes when I can’t settle on my next read-possibly because what I have just finished was so good it seemed that nothing could live up to it, I just go back to a favorite author and reread one of my favorites by said author! after that I am usually ready to dive into something new. Works almost every time!
I’ve had one for the last three years. I went from reading around 300 books a year to around 100. I’ve gotten much better at dumping a book unfinished to find a better one, but the obsessive need to read is gone. It’s not been helped by over a year long problem with my ereader software which has been fixed then screws up over and over again. I now have a new reader, but I’m still not back to reading. Listening to YouTube Reddit stories has filled the void as well as providing a human voice around me. I live alone, and I’m a high risk for Covid so listening to anyone was a nice thing. It’s a weird situation not to be reading when I’ve been an obsessive reader my whole life.
4: Have you explored the Internet Archive’s cache of ancient radio shows?
@5 I used to listen to the old radio dramas, but they no longer hold my attention. If you enjoy English comedy, try THE GOON SHOW.
Thank you for writing this! I’ve been low key stressing/kicking myself about this for a few years. I can’t completely blame the pandemic, but my reading numbers have fallen off quite precipitiously, due to a few reasons.
One of them is good – in the past few years I’ve gotten increasingly interested in my own amateur/recreational writing (and especially during the pandemic it was a really fun way to spend my time). So, a lot of the spare time I spent on things like the bus ended up being used for that instead of reading. I also started delving more into my music/soundtrack passions.
But some of it is my own neuroticism. I have always been a big Keepr of Lists. I started keeping my main ‘Reading List’ in high school I think and maybe I could have finished it at some point (I STILL have classic or even “new” fantasy series reccomended to me by other geeky friends 20 years ago I haven’t touched yet!) But man, eventually college, grad school, marriage, motherhood and a busy job have gotten in the way and now I feel overwhelmed and guilty with the deluge of content constantly coming out (both with books and even with TV/movies which I was never THAT into but has become its own thing). I can barely keep up with ONE favorite author (ahem, Sanderson) much less my other favorite authors that I STILL am trying to catch up on.
And then there was my commitment to reading the whole Star Wars EU (which I actually am plugging away at) and now there’ s a whole new EU! So then I just get paralyzed and feel guilty when I go off list, or start something even though I haven’t finished X – series (I finally had to give my permission at one point to just…not finish series, or not be a completist that has to read every work by an author or in a given universe/franchise for it to ‘count’). Plus I’ve branched a little more into non-fiction and also have a theology reading list and sometimes those get heavy and then I get slowed down and I tend to be one of those people that only likes to read 1-2 books at a time. I’m definitely a reading monogomist.
And, even stuff like keeping up with Tor is practically a full time job lol, plus I’m a regular on a blogging community. And a few YT channels I enjoy. Honestly, I’m glad I’m not a podcast person because I have no idea how I would even keep up with THAT.
But yeah, geekdom (both the bookish type – which did used to be my primarly form) almost feels like a full time job these days (no wonder there are reactors who really DO make it a full time job…).
But the funny thing is I was just getting really excited to get some new books because I’m ready to jump back in, once I finish the backlog of SW Insiders (which of course have given me more ideas for books to read) that I am finally almost through with. :)
i found i could not read much while my father was ill, and what i did read didn’t stick with me or impress me much. after he passed i found the covid anxiety just exacerbated my lack of reading enthusiasm… i still read articles and news, but not books and especially not novels. i understood it was a part of my grieving process but i just didn’t feel at all like myself when i wasn’t “reading.” i’ve been an obsessive reader since i was 6 or 7. i did try rereading loved books, but kind of had the “what’s the point? feeling. i would say it took almost 9 months or more before i could really read again. i still don’t feel that i have reached my pre-grieving levels but i hope that someday it will come back to me.
I got hit with another kind of reading slump in the last few years, which turned out to be a “your eyes are getting older and you really need reading glasses” slump. If you find you’re only reading e-readers or phones and you’re only reading them in bed in a microscopic font right up next to your face because in bed you routinely take your glasses off anyway… maybe this slump has happened to you!
(This slump damaged my reading rate significantly for *years* before I noticed what was going on. Having proper glasses and reading multiple books a week again is like being given a new lease of life.)
I’ve never understood the whole “must read” list or the idea of setting reading goals. I read for pleasure, or to learn something new. My tastes are eclectic and my personal library reflects that. Possibly reflecting my age, but the library or my local independent bookstore is a fun outing to find something to read followed by a cappuccio at the local cafe. I love the smell of a bookstore, that dusty paper smell. It’s a sort of haven from all the busyness of the 21st century. Inviting: there are worlds here for you to find. There is, usually, a book in my bag when off on errands or a long trip to savor in the hotel or when I stop for a driving break. Definitely to fall into on a plane flight.
It doesn’t matter to me – at all – if the book in my hands or the audiobook in my car is on someone’s “hot new release” or “read this before you die” list. Fandom? If that’s your cup of tea, fine.
When the pandemic hit, I found myself reading old favorites, then that slump set in. Skimming a few pages then setting it down. Anxiety, as the Goblin King says, “when the world falls down”, boredom, feeling lost, misplaced, alone. I missed the city I live in ( I still do) and all my friends. This all added up to being restless and maybe little depressed.
As the world still reels from the losses and the fear of the next variant or the next catastrophe to hit the news, it’s still a bit hard to dig into a book.