The year after I graduated from college, I read, on average, three books a month, except when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, during which I suffered for three months, or when I borrowed The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I read slower and slower during the last hundred pages, hoping it would last through summer. After three and a half years of college English classes, I read and analyzed what critics deemed “literature”, and I followed only books stamped with the literati seal of approval. I read page after page on Wikipedia, skimming summaries but really digging into the Awards section. What did it win? And how many did it win? I was sick. I’d open up that shit and memorize lists and lists of novels on the National Book Critics Circle Award links. Man Booker Prize. Pulitzer Prize (with significantly less interest than the first two).
The only books I remember reading were One Hundred Years and Kavalier and Clay. The rest I only remember, because I kept a list of what I finished. Off that list, I could only recite basic plot summary for a handful, and then would immediately direct you to Wikipedia. I can’t tell you why I don’t remember them, not for sure. But I get the feeling that I don’t remember them, because I felt nothing for them.
Reading "literature” did not make me a better reader. It did not make me more worldly. It did not make me “better” than other book readers. Most certainly, it made me a pretentious asshole. Melissa, a coworker a decade older than I, also a big reader, told me she gave up on One Hundred Years. “I just didn’t like it,” she said. “I didn’t get it.” I understood what she meant; some books are not meant for quick reading and forgetting. Some demand attention. Some demand patience. I struggled through One Hundred Years to prove I could read it and “get” it, but I don’t know if I should have. I do not feel regret, only longing that finishing it had more significance.
After that year, the averages started to fall. First, it was an average of two to three books a month, the next year maybe one book in half a year. I read more news and finished a fourth of an expired library loan every four months. I stopped writing. I explained away my disinterest, excusing myself by blaming email and constructing polite letters to Accounts Receivable departments. I wrote analyses based on data collected for years. I probably wrote less than twelve double-spaced pages in a year, the length of one paper for a single class.
The year I stopped reading, I felt like something in me was dying. I had lost something that I could not identify. And eventually, I realized it: I had lost my identity. Reading and writing had always been part of me, and without them, I had become stuck in a routine I hated. I sat in front of Excel spreadsheets in a fucking freezing office with no windows, calculating profitability totals. I had a calcified cyst on my right wrist. I shook week-old crumbs out of my wireless keyboard.
So I bought an e-reader. I read non-fiction. I read translated fiction. I read young adult (and now Amazon won’t let it go, Jesus). I decided to stop reading books by old straight white guys. Sometimes, I was disappointed. Sometimes, I was surprised. Sometimes, I ugly-cried (thanks, A Little Life). Sometimes, I went back and read some books on those literati lists, and still struggled through them. I read American Pastoral and hated it (more on this later), and then I read The Vegetarian but realized it was a misnomer.
Whenever a book doesn’t interest me, I put it down and return it. I refuse to suffer through another book again.
