I think that so many of us have found that it’s difficult to replicate that same passion for reading, and therefore think we’ve either lost our love of books or lost the ability to enjoy reading, because we’ve forgotten to re-evaluate the types of liturature that we read.
I, like a lot of people, grew up using young adult fantasy as a form of escaping my dire childhood. Everything I read was young adult fiction, and I loved it. I inhaled it, I stayed up all night to read it. So as I got older, I kept going back and back and back to the YA fiction section. And over time I found myself leaving the book closed a little longer, going to sleep instead of reading, forgetting the book places, taking 2 and 3 and 4 times as long to finish it, until eventually I found it difficult to even finish a book, even if I liked the story. I thought I had lost my love of reading and it made me really sad.
Until one day, I picked up a non YA fiction book, and then I picked up another, and another, and another, and another. What I discovered is that I really enjoy non fiction political books, I really enjoy murder mysteries, I really enjoy adult fiction, I really enjoy books on religion and theory. I really enjoy so many things that aren’t YA fiction. As I’ve aged and matured, what I need to feed and preoccupy my mind is different than what I needed as a kid. I no longer need liturature to escape my life, what I need is liturature that stimulates my mind.
I imagine a lot of you are the same. You just haven’t found that new genre of liturature that feeds your mind. And it doesn’t help that we engage in bad habits that make it hard for us to focus. So I have to get into the habit of forcing myself to set some time aside to read, and that’s ok.
If you’re struggling, go find a book you loved as a young adult and reread it, then build off of what you liked about it. Sometimes rereading an old favorite can spark new love in you.
So if you loved reading as a kid and you think you’ve lost the knack for it, I encourage you to branch out and make yourself make some time to read every day.
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
