Throughout my childhood, I consumed as many books as my library card would allow me to withdraw. I even took out books inappropriate for my age range using my dad’s library card (although he claims not to remember this). I have a fond memory of my dad handing a copy of The Exorcist over to the librarian and she looking at me and saying, “This isn’t for you, is it?” I shook my head, no doubt with an expression of sheer terror on my face, but the librarian scanned it through anyway, smirking. I read that book on a family holiday and couldn’t sleep for about a week. I think I was about ten.
I continued to read voraciously up until I finished my English literature degree. While I loved studying literature and could have picked no other subject, reading became a sort of job for three years and it felt more like hard work than it ever had done before. It didn’t feel as magical. It took me a good couple of years to relearn how to read for pleasure again, but it never felt quite as natural as it did pre-adulthood. It’s the only aspect of my youth I truly miss.
While reading didn’t feel so easy in my twenties, it may have had something to do with the fact that I chose nothing but challenging books – and by challenging, I mean morbid, gloomy and downright harrowing. I look back on that time with a sense of awe as I genuinely couldn’t stomach such an onslaught of fictional misery today, but back then I couldn’t get enough. I fell in love with dystopian fiction big time (and started writing this blog) because it felt like the truest, rawest genre there was. I felt like I was looking life unflinchingly in the eye.
Then the pandemic hit. Oh, the pandemic. I fear I write about it too much on Dystopic, but it had such a profoundly catastrophic impact on my reading habits that I can’t avoid it. It seems almost uncool to talk about that time now, and I do feel an odd urge to apologise for bringing it up.
Unsurprisingly I struggled to read during the pandemic, and my love (and stamina) for dystopian fiction waned. I guess it’s not fun to imagine what it would be like to face the implosion of society when you’re actually facing it. And, let’s be honest, things haven’t really picked up much since then.
Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s my pessimistic outlook, but I just can’t look at the world with hope any more. When I read dystopian fiction in my twenties, I enjoyed seeing the light shining through the darkness and got excited for the rebel characters’ vision of a better world. I understood why they fought for what was right, despite the dangers. Now I just think, “Get used to it, buddy, it’s never going to get any better.”
I’m being melodramatic. Sort of. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that misery doesn’t entertain me now, and not only has this affected my love for dystopian fiction, but it also means I can no longer read books that I’m not 100% in the mood for. The number of books I have started and put down over the last five years must be at an obscene all-time high. I used to be proud of the fact that I never ever DNF’ed (did not finish) a book, no matter how bad it was, but now I do it at the slightest whim.
Perhaps I haven’t fallen out of love with reading, or the habit of it, I just struggle to lose myself in a story these days. Wow, that’s depressing, isn’t it? But it’s true. I don’t lose time because I’m so absorbed in another world, I always seem to have one foot out the door – or out the book? I don’t know, I’m struggling with this metaphor almost as much as I’m struggling to read.
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