The reading life: feast or famine

My best strategy for breaking out of a reading slump

Photo taken Sept. 2006

This post was meant to go out yesterday, but I started writing about reading and next thing I knew I was just reading. And since I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump lately, I decided to run with it. Anyway, the Friday after Thanksgiving isn’t a real day. It’s an interstitial space. Any day that begins with eating leftover green jello salad (I know, I know, child of the seventies, what can I say?) doesn’t count as a real day.

(Look, it has cottage cheese and walnuts. It’s practically health food.)

Isn’t it strange that we talk about ‘reading slumps’ when we’re reading tens of thousands of words a week? I’ve been pondering what I mean when I use that term, and it’s always about books. Specifically, finishing them. I can be reading several online articles and essays a day, and a poem or two, and a chapter of the current readaloud with Huck and Rilla, and a handful of Readwise highlights, and a book review, and several pages of my own WIP, and a few chatty notes from friends, and of course a steady drizzle of tweets and Insta captions—and at the end of the day I’ll be cross with myself for being unable to focus on a novel.

When I write it out like that, it’s comical—the equivalent of racking up 12,000 steps in one day doing yard work and then scolding yourself because you didn’t go for a walk.

But I understand where the uneasiness comes from. There are times when the balance of my reading life shifts from mostly books to mostly not books. And I’ve been a reader long enough to know that I’m better at almost everything when I’m living in the mostly-books end of the spectrum. Better at writing, thinking, creating, walking, conversing, parenting, living.

(I said almost everything. During a book frenzy, I’m not better at, say, getting the taxes done. I was certainly not better at getting dinner on the table in a timely manner back when I did most of the cooking. Luckily for me—not to mention the kids—Scott took over dinner duty ages ago. These days, the only meals I’m in charge of are Thanksgiving and Christmas.)

Huh. There’s an idea. Maybe the clattering of pots in the kitchen should be my signal to sit down with a book. That’s like 45 minutes a day. What have I been doing with that time, all these years? Reading about books, writing about books, reading about writing books, reading about writers who write about reading books? LOL. It can all begin to curl in on itself until you don’t know where the reading ends and the meta-reading begins—like those videos of cats who squeeze themselves into fishbowls with their eyes peeking out from under their tails.

Which, let’s face it, is probably what I’m watching instead of reading a book.

Well, this weekend is officially the beginning of my cozy season, and I loooove cozy season. In cozy season, I’m a reader. A reader of books.

I have a favorite strategy for climbing out of a reading slump: rereading a book I already love. It works every time. (Especially if the taxes are due.) Some never-fail picks are:

The Uncommon Reader¹ by Alan Bennett, a charming novella about what happens when the Queen of England discovers the royal bookmobile. It’s full of wry humor and delicious quotes, like:

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. (Really anything by Helene Hanff. Her unflagging enthusiasm for talking about books instantly restores my zest for reading.

Any of the Betsy-Tacy high school books, especially Heaven to Betsy, in which Betsy wrestles with conflicting impulses: the fun of a juicy social life vs. the satisfaction of quiet writing time.

Walking homeward, looking up at the sky, and around her at the wan landscape, she felt an inexplicable yearning. It was mixed up with Tony, but it was more than Tony. It was growing up; it was leaving Hill Street and having someone else light a lamp in the beloved yellow cottage. She felt like crying, and yet there was nothing to cry about.

She made up poems as she tramped homeward, the snow squeaking under her feet. Sometimes when she reached home she wrote them down and put htem with Tony’s notes deep in the handkerchief box. But she did this secretly.

“What has become of your writing, Betsy?” her mother asked. “Are you sure you don’t want Uncle Keith’s trunk [Betsy’s old desk] down in your bedroom?”

Betsy was sure; she didn’t want it, although she still climbed to the third floor and visited it sometimes.

Writing didn’t seem to fit in with the life she was living now. Carney didn’t write; Bonnie didn’t write. Betsy felt almost ashamed of her ambition. The boys teased her about being a Little Poetess. She felt that she would die if anyone discovered those poems in the handkerchief box, and the bits of stories she still wrote sometimes when she was supposed to be doing algebra.

I’ve just reread a post I wrote about this book long ago that expresses exactly why I can always rely on the Betsy-Tacy books to rescue me from a reading slump:

14-year-old Betsy is still entertaining her chums with her ready wit and lively spirits. But she hasn’t quite figured out what to do with this other side of herself, the serious, introspective side, the place the poems come from. She’ll get there, but it’ll take time. And as life changes, she’ll have to sort the sides of herself all over again: we see her still groping for balance in Betsy’s Wedding, the final book of the series. I love that; it rings quite true.

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This time around, I turned to another old friend: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Her prose is magnetic and her characters pull me out of my own head—and this one, a lifelong favorite, takes place at Thanksgiving.

It worked. It always does. By the time Charles Wallace met a time-traveling unicorn at the star-watching rock, my reading slump had been swept away as if by a fresh, clear wind—to be replaced by an even more serious affliction: a reading obsession.

After all, it was Thanksgiving Day, and I had a dinner to make.

1. As requested, I’m including Bookshop.org affiliate links. Any purchase you make directly benefits an independent bookstore, and I get a small commission that inevitably goes to fund my own reading habit.