That’s not to say that I spend a ton of time improving my mind by extensive reading, Mr. Darcy. There have been whole swaths of time where I read nothing but explicit vampire fan fiction. Years in fact. No shame. #ThatsNormal
But lately, when someone asks what I’ve been reading, I have had one, immediate, visceral response.
Because I don’t know what in the limp dust jacket I am doing lately. I am a rudderless reader, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s problematic. I am vacillating between reading too much and not enough, too new and too familiar.
Maybe you guys can help. Maybe you can identify with some of these behaviors. Maybe we can navigate these waters together. Because currently, my reading status is: who tf are you to ask me something so personal?
Distracted by Dystopia
My biggest reading hurdle lately: real life. Easily 80% of my leisure reading time has been sucked up by the dystopian realities of our current political and social climate. Who has time to read the latest Melina Marchetta novel when you need to fully understand how our new president is violating the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution? I have to bone up on civics before I can bow out of reality in some urban fantasy.
I’ve got subscriptions to the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the New York Times to sift through daily. Not to mention 7 different policy podcasts to listen to and a slew of articles online that I have to run through a “is this fake news” filter before even clicking. It’s exhausting. I don’t have time for my yearly re-read of Persuasion.
But what can we do? Limit our knowledge of the goings on in the world? Allow ourselves to be dictated to by one source, one group, one echo chamber? No … we have to seek out knowledge and stay informed on our own. Now more than ever. Sigh.
Someone Stop Me
Which leads me to my next reading problem: I am trying to read too much.
And by this I don’t just mean online punditry. I’m dying to know more about the things I thought I knew but didn’t. But I’m afraid I’m turning into one of those insufferable assholes who refuses to have a conversation without footnotes and citations, like some first year MFA student who just got through one third of his first copy of Infinite Jest.*
*See? I just dropped a David Foster Wallace reference in a paragraph about how I am becoming insufferable and a pseudo intellectual. STOP ME.
On my nightstand right now is a copy of The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (well worn and much read), The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and In the Beginning…We Misunderstood by Johnny Miller and John Soden.
Why do I feel the need to know everything about these conflicting issues? I think I’m an asshole.
Comfort Characters
Third in my latest reading issue is simply resorting to old favorites because they make me feel good and require a lot less brain power than something new. Comfort reading. Like curling up in my Mammaw’s rose quilt, books I know that I already love have seen even more of my precious reading time lately.
I know why. It’s the aforementioned other issues. They are bombarding my waking thoughts, and when I have time to settle my mind and relax, I can’t be sure that the new author or even the new series by a beloved one is going to aid me in that relaxation. So I stick with old faves that make me happy and give me no pause.
Oh, you want to know which ones? Hint: they are almost all smut, and every single one of them is in my epic Book Recommendations post. Lately, I’ve been re-reading the Fever series after attending FeverCon. I wrote about why last week.
Fan Fiction Forever
No shame. Real talk. There are two fandoms that have stuck in my craw, characters that I love SO MUCH I cannot quit them, don’t want to quit them, and require more than is available in their canon iterations. So what does that mean? It means I get sucked into fanfiction vortices and refuse to emerge.
Check!Please is the funniest, most creative, most addictive web comic ever conceived. It updates every couple of months, and between epic updates, the only thing to do is keep Bitty and Jack and Shitty and Ransom and Chowder and Lardo and the rest of the Samwell Hockey Team on the brain by extensive fan fic reading. Lindsey and I told y’all to fall into that fandom like a year ago. Get on it.
Also, Yuri!!! On Ice is the purest, sweetest, happiest television experience of 2016, but it is sadly only 12 short episodes of heaven. So what does one do when they’ve watched it all 7 or 8 times and cried at least that much? They read as much fanfic as that little fandom can write. AND THEY CAN WRITE A LOT OF IT. There are like 10K fics on AO3 right now. I’ve been busy.
This little slice of gay domestic bliss doesn’t happen in the show ^^^ You know where it happens constantly?? FANFIC.
Make Me
My real life book club is meeting this Friday at my house. I’m serving Italian Sausage and Ricotta Pasta. We are discussing Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, which I am almost finished with and BLOWN AWAY by. (See Amy’s review here). I’m also in the midst of re-reading Voyager for our In the Waterweeds chats every two weeks. And other obligatory reading is creeping back into my schedule and making me get out from under Mammaw’s quilt.
So, it looks like being forced to read something for whatever reason will propel me out of this funk. HELP.
