My Reading Self is Dead

Hi guys,

I’m wondering how you’re all faring with the reading these days. I could go look on Goodreads and find out, I suppose, or ask you in person, but why not in the form of a letter. The reason I ask is I suspect my reading self is dying.

When I was at the age when one is supposed to care about one’s looks, I would get up before the rest of my family and wash my hair in the bathroom sink. I still have regular dreams about this bathroom: dull gold fixtures, myriad colourful towels weighing down the shower curtain bar (we had multiple arguments about whose towel is whose, resulting in most of us claiming several clean ones between laundry days), old copies of Reader’s Digest wrinkling at the corners in the dampness. Recalling the feeling of reading “Drama in Real Life” or “Laughter, the Best Medicine” is as childhood to me as the smell of toast burning in our bungalow kitchen or the slightly peeling rainbow wallpaper of my bedroom. While I washed my hair, I’d prop up a paperback on one of those towels beside the sink and read. I’d continue reading while I blow dried my hair into a version of electric-shocked 80s bangs, holding the book under my foot. And then I read in all the other standard places: the car, waiting for my brothers to finish their piano lessons, at my brothers’ basketball games, under the covers when I was supposed to be sleeping.

Adulthood and its attendant responsibilities wipe out many of those reading opportunities, yet bring forth a freedom with how one structures one’s time, so reading could still be that kind of obsession for me. I worry that it’s becoming something of an obligation.

Friends and neighbours lend me books. I buy another shelf and register it under my dependents by the name Guilt Pile II. I keep dodging have you read it yet by referring to my ever-growing list of work book priorities. When I read my work books, it is not fun. I feel like I’m working.

So, by the end of the day, faced with a stretch of time and content options that would have made my teenybopper heart soar, I sometimes just look at the cats. I can’t decide which book to read, and if I can, I often can’t bring myself to pick it up. I go to bed and look at the hour-by-hour forecast on my phone, or plug letters into a crossword app until I pass out, forsaking yet another day that could’ve been enriched by reading.

What is happening? Is it happening to you?

I tend to look at writers who don’t read with great judgement, the way you’d look at, say, a John Mayer who refused to listen to the delta blues: come on, man, what are you doing. This is how you learn the craft. Here I am becoming one of those people. Yoikes.

My worst pattern and my greatest fear is that I turn a hobby into work. So far, I’ve avoided that with reading but now I’m leaning over the precipice, hovering over a crevasse whose angles and sharp rocks are the corners of books marked “To Read” that scrape and bounce me on my way down.