I’m a reader. I don’t remember learning to read. My mom tells me I was two when I started. But I feel like I’ve always been reading. I’ll read pretty much anything someone puts in front of me. I take recommendations. I read fiction of almost any genre and nonfiction on almost any topic. My Goodreads profile says I’ve finished over 600 books, but the actual number is much higher than that. I’ve only been on Goodreads for eight years. Plus, that doesn’t include all of the magazines, newspapers, blogs, liner notes, and everything else I read. Anyway, the point is that I’m a reader.
One of the most surprising casualties of the pandemic, for me, has been my reading. I still read. But, I’m down to fifteen or twenty minutes a day. I read before bed, and that’s about it lately. I can’t figure out why. The pandemic has made so many of the things that would usually keep me from reading impossible. You would think I’d be reading more, not less. I still enjoy the reading I do before bed. It’s confusing.
If I had to guess, I’d say that my relative lack of reading is related to the stress/trauma/whatever-you-want-to-call-it of living through a pandemic, being isolated, and everything else 2020 has thrown at us. Not reading, not spending time with those authors and characters, has made isolation even lonelier than it would have been. I just hope as the vaccine gets out there and things return to some level of normality, my old habits come back. I miss it.
