Anatomy of a Reading Slump

They come along for me once a year or so, the dreaded reading slumps. Suddenly no book is the right book, nothing seems to hold my attention long enough to finish, books I've longed to read disappoint. These slumps often seem to come on without warning, but in truthfulness, it's more accurate to say that they are the warning. My reading life is such a large part of who I am, of how I understand who I am, of how I go about being a human being, that when it gets derailed, I tend to get a little lost. But as  I sit here in the beginning of the end of the latest big slump, one of about three in the past five years, it becomes increasingly clear to me that it isn't that the slump leads me to lose my way, but that I wander into the slump because I'd already strayed off the path.

This most recent slump comes at a time when I'm a bit floundery in other aspects of my life--should I apply for that job? is the puppy ever going to have less energy than the average mid-sized sun? just how many short story ideas can my brain throw at me at once rather than focusing on the novel I'm trying to draft?--and it materialized in the form of some thirty books started and abandoned somewhere between page twenty and page one hundred. Thirty books abandoned over the course of three months, and twenty-two finished. The number finished is roughly on par with normal for me, but the number abandoned is high. I'm not one of those readers who finishes everything she starts on principle--I will leave a book behind without (much) regret if it isn't sufficiently pulling up my socks--but I more often abandon books with intent, and most of those within a few pages (which is usually enough to know if a book is the right one for the moment). To leave behind book after book past page one hundred is a sign that something is, if not wrong, then at least out of the usual.

I've tried all kinds of strategies over the years to interrupt a slump: try some nonfiction (the often stronger sense that someone is actually talking to you can be helpful); listen to an audiobook (frequently makes me a happier slumper, but rarely actually helps me get over the inability to get truly stuck in to an eyeballs-in-pages read); string together a few light, non-taxing books (sometimes helpful; sometimes just makes me crazy that I can't even get through ding-dang fluff); read something short (...can't even get through something ding-dang short); just stop worrying about it and watch some TV or something (I have seen some really excellent television this way, though I've never known it to really address the problem at hand). None of these really works because they are all bandages. They keep me from bleeding on things, but they don't actually heal the wound.

I cannot be me without reading a lot. That's part of who I am, and the restoration I feel after a good hour or two of uninterrupted reading helps me be fully me. But reading cannot be all of me. Sometimes I think I ask too much of my reading. In times of increased stress or uncertainty, I want it to be all things to me. I search for The Perfect Book, the one book that will be salve for whatever ails me, the precise tome whose voice, characters, style, sentences, and story will be just right, just the thing. It is no accident, I think, that I buy too many books while I'm in a slump. When all else is not precisely as I might like, I look in my reading for the ideal, gathering in as many books as I can, as that ideal must be in one of them. And in the process I forget to (or forget how to) allow myself to enjoy the act of reading, the process of it, the work of it. For it is not just restoration that I find in reading, but a making of self. The reading is not, however, the whole of that work. Much of it must go on outside the pages of a book, outside, even, my head. And when I try to narrow that work down to just the one thing, just the one thing I know, have always known, with great certainty, is the most reliable piece of that work, it is a narrowing in the fullest sense, and I get tangled up without enough room to carry on.

The slump is an outward sign of that tangling up. It is a rebellion against my attempt to put too much value on what should be only a single piece of a whole. The tricky part is in not holding so tight to that one piece that I haven't enough strength in my grasp to reach beyond it.