When It’s Time To Change Your Reading Habits

It’s funny, sometimes, to step back and look at your own reading habits. They can seem thoroughly unremarkable—so much so as to be unnoticeable—until something shakes them up. Left to my own devices, I am as likely to get into reading ruts as I am to zoom all over the genre and topic map, trading fantasy for nature writing for literary fiction for an anthology of essays for a memoir about a place or a neighborhood or one moment in time.

This year, though, I’ve been reading almost exclusively science fiction, which is a trip. It’s limiting and eye-opening at once, an experience that is fascinating and weird and sending me down a lot of random meandering paths about what exactly science fiction is, what it does, what it ought to more frequently encompass, and what beautifully porous boundaries it has.

This project is also making me want to read so many other things. I have a contrary brain; fed a steady diet of something it loves, it insists that it wants something else, another flavor, a bit of variety. It insists, basically, that it wants to break any rules I have set for it, and smash all habits like so many old plates.

Including some long-standing habits about saving things for later.

I’ve written about this before, briefly: how I always save myself one Helen Oyeyemi or William Gibson book, so I know I’ve always got one more to read. How I can’t seem to read Assassin’s Fate, because then the story of FitzChivalry Farseer will be over and maybe I’ll have no choice but to go back to thirty years ago and start all over again. 

It’s not just these specific examples, though. I buy books I am incredibly excited to read and then I let them gather dust on a shelf. I order things out of absolute rushes of interest and then decide it’s not the time. Inexplicably, I rarely—unless I am reading them for work purposes—read brand-new books. I think with curious fondness about books I’ve heard so much about, and then simply do not pick them up.

These are the kind of reading habits I all of a sudden want to break, to snap them like little twigs underfoot. But they’re also a little puzzlings: where do they come from? 

Some part of it is, I think, the simple thrill and mess and trouble of anticipation. Book people love to use the word “anticipation.” It is, on book product pages, probably the second-most beloved word, after “award-winning” or “best.” Awards are ideal. Best book of the year is a great phrase to put on your book; most anticipated is, well, next-best. It’s shorthand for “People want to read this!” which is a very useful thing to be able to say when your job—whether as publicist or marketer or author—is to get that book into the hands of more people who would like to read it.

But—forgive me—what does it mean? Not on a media side; I don’t mean in the case of something like Christina Orlando’s excellent, well-researched lists, which are a tool and a marvel. What does it mean to a reader to anticipate a book? Is it as simple as the thought “I like other books by this author, ergo I will probably like this one too?” Or is it a more emotional response: Last time I read a book by this person I melted into a puddle of feelings for a week and I can’t wait to do that again.

Or is it a story we tell ourselves about the kind of readers we are? I am a reader who will, absolutely, get around to reading this 800 page history of Australia. I am going to go back and finish the last book of Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, even though I haven’t read the first two in decades. I am going to read all of Bone, all of the Wheel of Time, all of the award-winning books of the last few years that I haven’t read yet. I am anticipating doing these things.

I would like to be that reader, honestly. But I’m not organized. I cannot make a reading schedule, a plan for which book I’m going to read when, this one followed by that one followed by a logical third in the sequence. I can schedule reading time, but not reading titles. It is all moods and whims, at least when it isn’t deadlines.

Lately those moods and whims are a little off. It’s August, which always feels like a slightly mournful month to me. It’s a time of real-world aches and happenings in my life and the lives of people I love. It’s another fraught election year, in which it feels both impossible to look at the news and impossible to turn away from it, even for a second, with its strange highs and devastating lows. It’s all these things, making me land on one thought, over and over again, no matter the topic: What are we waiting for? What am I waiting for?

You can ask this question about a whole wide world of things, but right this second I am only thinking about books: Why don’t I just read them already? Why don’t I pick up Peaces, or Agency, or lug that massive Robin Hobb tome to the bar and let myself cry quietly into its pages? Why did I start The Once and Future King, finally, finally, and then set it aside just a chapter in? Reading doesn’t change the books. They will still be there for re-reading, for finding more in. But it might change me.

Sometimes a book is too much. Too many feelings, too many associations, too many expectations, too much anticipation. I get wary of it. Sometimes it feels like a commitment I can’t bring myself to make. Sometimes I’m just not in the right space for a character, or a topic, or I’m too busy jogging down some other avenue, curiosity sending me into new genre corners. I need more time, somehow.

But time feels in short supply in this fall-feeling August in this warm year on our ever-warming planet. There’s a sense of teetering, of precipices all around. This is always true, to varying degrees for different people, but sometimes the feeling creeps up more strongly than other times.

What I am saying, in so many words, is read the books. Read the things you anticipated with tingling in your fingers. Read the things you were saving for a rainy day or just in case you really needed that book one day that hasn’t arrived yet. There is—this may sound like heresy, but I believe it—there is always another book. Or there is going to be another book. What have you been waiting for? What if you just started it?