It’s Okay To Not Read Books Right Now!!

A lot of great books are coming out right now, and a lot of us suddenly have a ton of time to read. However, I have not been reading very much. And that’s okay!!

Once social distancing started, I thought it would give me the chance to catch up on a lot of reading. I have a very large stack of books that I haven’t read yet in my room, and I thought since I wouldn’t get a chance to get new books, I would be able to get through a lot of them.

It’s been about a month and I’m proud to say that I haven’t read one book in that pile. Not one.

I was wondering why it seems like I’m in a reading slump. I’m not the type of person who typically puts off reading something. Also, I’ve been relatively active during this time, baking, writing, attending online school, fostering a new pup, and hanging out with my family. It’s not like I’m just sitting around eating ice cream and binging TV shows.

Here’s what I think is happening: when things were ‘normal’ I was so busy that whenever I had the chance to read it was a big relief. I would check out an average of around five books a week from the library and would try to read as much of them as possible. Balancing school, extracurriculars, sleep, and reading was really hard, so I was really motivated to read whenever I could.

But now, I have so much time on my hands that I’d rather do other things than read. I spend so long staring at various screens that staring at a page seems impossible. If I don’t have things scheduled for a certain time, I would rather be doing something active or working on a new hobby than reading.

It’s also really easy to feel guilty about not reading; there are so many new resources to get free or cheap books as well as a lot of debuts that are hard not to feel bad about not supporting. But seriously- reading is super hard right now. Perphaps it’s because we feel like we’re in one of those apocalypse novels, or our new highly unstructured lives make it hard to focus on things other than what we absolutely have to do. So, if you aren’t reading as much as you’d like or at all, it’s completely okay.

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