Tsundoku (buying books and not reading them)
Alternative title: The reader who wasn't reading
I have a complicated relationships with reading. As a kid I was "the little lady of the library". As an adult I was "the library lady" in several schools, then "the library man" in the same setting. You would expect two things from a librarian: be organized and read a lot. I have often failed at both of these.
I'm still messy but lately I've been reading more. Or is it reading? My dad disagrees. See, I am now into audiobooks. They've been a loophole in the anxiety I have somehow developed about reading. I can listen to something while playing video games, walking, or just resting with my eyes closed (I've also been very tired).
How did something I loved so much as a kid, even as a young teenager, become so difficult for me? Of course there is the depression that crept up on me from the end of middle school. These times where I felt like screaming but I didn't know why. The mingling of bullying trauma with undiagnosed ADHD, and I think mononucleosis which kickstarted the whole thing.
I was a literature major in high school so when I didn't have a lot of reading energy, I had to put it into the books we were studying. I enjoyed some of these books, don't get me wrong (I actually have fond memories of most the books we studied senior year), but reading became associated with school and school, despite having been a straight-A student earlier, became painful. Writing was the same. I was drained. Trying to major in philosophy in college didn't help.
After dropping out of college and into a small journalism school, where less reading was expected of me, I found the path back to reading for pleasure. I remember the Fall of my second year, I had just discovered Robin Hobb and was enjoying her books immensely. It suddenly felt like my depression was lifting, I was seeing the sun and the sun was the Farseer trilogy. Yet somehow, sometime (when I pivoted to university again for my master's?) reading became difficult again.
Despite not reading that much, loving books and being a reader were still part of my identity. I often got books as gifts, and even bought some with the vague, fleeting hope that I would get back into it. As I mentioned before, I also became a school librarian.
A year and a half ago I met my girlfriend, who was also a librarian. Unlike me she was a voracious reader, the kind who couldn't get out of the house without a minimum of two books and required hours of reading time per day. I'm not sure what happened exactly but she made me want to read again. At that point I had already started listening to audiobooks, but I started doing it more. Now I again feel comfortable calling myself a reader.
The fun thing is audiobooks are digital (I don't even own a CD-player) but I still like buying books. I have so many physical books that I can't bring myself to read, despite really wanting to experience their stories. For a while now my loose rule has been to only buy things I couldn't get in audio, most often comic-books, where missing the pictures would be a big loss. As a result I have many comics and I still don't read them.
I'm trying to get back into physical reading, not because I look down on my audiobook use but to open my possibilities. And also, to be honest, to justify buying new paper books.
My girlfriend has a tote bag saying "Tsundoku: syndrome consisting in buying books and stocking them around oneself, often as piles, without ever reading them". She does buy many many books, maybe more than she will ever be able to read, but I keep feeling the term applies better to me, considering the proportion of physical books I read out of physical books I buy. Sometimes I tell myself I help the book economy, sometimes I think about the environmental impact of printed books someone once told me about (hi Romuald if you're reading this!), most of the time I try to be neutral about it.
On my Bookwyrm account I have three paper books in my "currently reading". One is a comic, another a play, another a short novel, which I all purchased/was gifted recently. I would finish any of them within a couple hours, but I don't. So why? I think I'm afraid to commit. Put away all distractions and just get into it. It's funny because a few days ago I read a whole chapter of a book (a part of the printed version that hadn't made it to the audio one so I borrowed my girlfriend's physical book) and had absolutely no problem getting into it. I think it's because I wasn't trying to so, yeah, I'm gonna have fun reverse-psychologising myself.
Write/read you soon.