#13: Burnout and Books

How I went from reading less than 1 book a year, to 40 in 6 months, Korean banchan, and lots of Apple TV+

Minus 2023, I’ve read maybe 5 books to completion within the last 5 years. In the last 6 months, I’ve read around 40 books to completion.

Barnes & Noble was my candyland as a child. Wanting to foster the allure that books naturally had over me, my mom played a dangerous game; while she refused to spoil me with toys and forcefully engrained the value of a dollar in me, she would let me choose 2-3 books every visit to that Barnes & Noble. While there, she’d settle in with her Starbucks in the café with her own book, and unleash me to ravage the bookshelves in pursuit of my next read. We’d spent 1-2 hours in there each time, during which I devised a way to sneak in more books: I’d quickly choose the longer ones I wanted to take home, and then select a read that I could finish while hiding in the aisles. I’m convinced that this is what encouraged my abnormal reading speed.

At home, my bookcase was crammed full of books: the Babysitter’s Club series, Chronicles of Narnia, Nancy Drew’s, books by Roald Dahl, and other classics, mostly hand-me-downs from my sister. I treated my books like my babies, never dog-eared, tried to not crease the bindings, and took way too much pleasure in organizing my books like a librarian for an 8-year-old.

Books were always my great love. In a childhood full of moving around and split communities between skating and school, I was fairly lonely. Thumbing through crisp pages is how I often found that sense of belonging and imagination with those characters, and an introduction to vocabulary that encapsulated my feelings I didn’t know how to put into words.