I have a lot of tabs open at almost all times. For no reason other than the fact that I click I bunch of links for articles that I plan to read, I start to read them and my goldfish attention span clicks out of the article and I just forget to go back to it.
Then when I am suddenly overwhelmed by all the small boxes at the top of my browser I start cutting the fat. Sometimes I just outright close the tab because a quick cast of my eyes over the first few lines tells me all that I need to know and as I close the tab I wonder why I ever opened it in the first place. Sometimes I actually take the time to read the article in full even when it says that the reading of the thing will take something ridiculous like 15 minutes.
Now, as an avid reader, that might sound ridiculous. 15 minutes in the grand scheme of things is nothing and I’m a quick reader so it probably won’t take that long but doing it on a screen just seems to make it seem even longer. I’m a paper reader. I own too many books, the piles of books that I have to read keep getting higher and more piles keep cropping up.
It’s nothing to do with liking the pretty covers or the feel of paper in my hands it’s all to do with the fact that with the number of hours that I spend reading I can’t do it all on the screen of an e-reader. My eyes would just never get a break.
I had a Kindle once upon a time.
It was around about a decade ago that I was in possession of one. It felt like it made the most sense for me to have one because I was doing an English Literature degree and there were oh so many books required to read for the degree over the 3 years that it took for me to complete it.
Everyone said that they were great. They could store so many books. You could make notes and highlight relevant pages. Everything just felt like it was more collected and compact. There were some people who promised that it would change my life. And save me money.
Yeah, if I turn my head to the left of where I am currently writing this missive, in a pile of books that somehow ended up in this particular part of the house, I can see 2 books that I ended up buying for my degree. They are thick tomes that house countless poems, essays or stories. They are a particular edition that you had to have because it had to be the most recent one and it ensure that all students were singing from the same songbook when page references were made. I couldn’t tell you exactly where they all exactly were because once a book enters a stack I just kind of forget about its existence, but I can tell you that I ended up owning about 80% of my required books for my degree.
This was partly because the editions required were super specific and they just didn’t exist in electronic form but this is mostly because every time I tried to give the Kindle a go I ended up sending myself completely mad.
I would be writing an essay and staring at my laptop screen until my eyes started to go blurry and in a bid to give my eyes a break I would try and catch up on my reading for the following week and the book in question would be on a Kindle. A screen. Meaning that my loopy eyes weren’t getting a break at all, they were just having to squint a bit more in order to read the words.
Another thing that I hated was the fact that even though I could highlight passages of interest and make notes, it was a total ball ache to actually find those notes and highlights again when I really needed them, which was typically in the middle of a tutorial when I had to share with the group.
A great source of anxiety for me is fumbling around and having people witness that. I don’t like looking incompetent. I have never been more grateful for the fact that although I can feel the heat in my cheeks they do not actually flush red in embarrassment or frustration, then I was in those tutorial sessions where my book was housed in the confines of my Kindle.
I persevered with that thing for the entirety of my degree, but I somehow always ended up with two editions of every book that I stored on there. In the end, the only use I could find for my Kindle was that it made it way easier to read fan fiction. I wouldn’t be lying in my bed propped up on one elbow scrolling on my laptop or squinting on my phone which was just a tad too small. The Kindle was just right.
As a result of the fact that I was just not getting on with the Kindle and all its e-reader wonderfulness my degree ended up being a tad more expensive the more I had to keep buying books. The degree as a whole was stacked so that a lot of texts were all included in one massive anthology (which was really good for my shoulder, why I never invested in a backpack in those days is a mystery to me) which cut the cost, but that wasn’t the same for all my modules.
I ended up having to carve a book budget within my student loan (and was also helped by the magic words ‘student discount’). This was a relatively easy thing to do because I hardly went out in my uni years and so all I was really spending my money on was food, the odd night or meal out and well books. I didn’t do a lot of reading for pleasure during those years because I was always trying to read two books in a week to keep up with both modules that I was doing in any given semester.
The problem with doing a degree that requires you to read all the time is that even though it sounds like the dream in theory, in reality, it involves reading a lot of books that you don’t really want to in a ridiculous amount of time. Or alternatively, it involves a lot of furious Googling so that you can at least bullshit your way through a tutorial and make it sound like you’ve read the book from start to finish. I did the latter only a handful of times because my anxiety just would not let me do that too often and I still to this day haven’t read Moby Dick. (I really do keep telling myself that I will read it one day, I’m a filthy liar, there is no way in hell that is happening. I don’t care enough.)
It took me a good while after I finished my degree to even find joy in reading again. I found joy in being in bookshops. The summer after I finished uni my best friend and I went to New York (and Orlando) and I took great joy in being in a Barnes and Noble for the first time. I even bought a book there just because I wanted the receipt that provided me with proof that I had been there. To New York. I think I might still have that receipt somewhere actually…but I didn’t really get any joy from reading the book that I bought. I think I DNF-ed it at the time and then went back to read it a couple of years later.
I did obviously at some point fall in love with reading again. I don’t quite remember when it happened, all I know is that the book hangover from 3 years of near hell did eventually wear off and I found solace in reading again.
The thing that I fell back on was the monotony of turning the pages every couple of minutes and watching the side on the right get smaller as the side on the left got bigger. I found the weight of the book in my hands reassuring as the balance of the pages shifted how it felt in them. I could lose myself in the physical pages and it was a lot harder to get distracted because there wasn’t some other tab to draw my attention or the temptation to just click out of the book and go onto the internet.
Reading was kind of stolen from me in 2020 (along with a lot of other stuff) and I didn’t realise how intrinsic it had become to my life after that dodgy first year post uni until I just could not get into the world of any book I picked up. It crept back to me over the course of last year and by the end of it I felt a part of myself had been returned to me. This year something has finally clicked back into place and reading sparks all kinds of joy.
It gives me a reason to put my phone down. It doesn’t always require me to wear my glasses in the same way that screens demand. I can lose hours in the pages of a book and actually feel like I have maybe achieved something when I come back to reality. I take a great deal of satisfaction from turning the final pages of a book and then shutting it for good and staring at the blurb that for the most part got me to pick the book up.
As a tangent, I also like collecting pretty covers, which isn’t possible when you collect them electronically. One day in the not too distant future I will be able to look at the spines of all the books I currently have in my possession on an actual bookshelf and not just stacked in piles in various parts of the house. If I’m super organised I could organise it by colours of the rainbow, blue will be very well serviced on that front…
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - Soooooo, I said I was going to swear off romance novels for the month and then I didn’t. I thought it would be simple because I’ve read most of the ones that I have in my possession, but then on Saturday Always Practice Safe Hex - Juliette Cross arrived and well, it didn’t make it through the weekend. But now, I’m off them and I’ve been making my way through Dark and Shallow Lies - Ginny Myers Sain all week now. (as always it’s an affiliate link)
What I’m watching - I’m not even joking when I say I have been impatiently counting down the days until Abbott Elementary was available in the UK and then I promptly blitzed through it over the bank holiday weekend. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do with myself now. What I actually did with myself is watch The Sex Lives of College Girls, also over the bank holiday weekend.
What I’m listening to - Can I have a conversation with someone about Leave Luanne from 35mm? This came up because my Apple Music radio station (this is really almost all I listen to) because musical theatre is a heavy feature on there and I’ve been a bit obsessed with it for a couple of weeks now. I don’t know this show at all (and I’ve not thought to Google it tbh) but this song is just kind of…incredible…
Title Inspiration - Do not ask me why I could not get Taylor Swift saying ‘next chapter’ at the end of The Story of Us out of my head, but I couldn’t and so I rolled with it.