I wouldn’t call myself a reader. I never really was. However, I was the kid who, every once in a while, got completely stuck on a single book that I would read it over and over again until I practically memorized it. One of those such books was Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.
I remember reading it in chunks, most often in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. Especially this one winter break, bright and early in the morning, when I was finally old enough to stay home alone with my sister. That break was filled with moments of overthinking and nerves, with the house often feeling too quiet. The kind of quiet that made you hyperaware of every sound. I remember sitting with my book open, whisked away in the fantasy of it all. I’ve heard from friends who fly through books weekly – that feeling is what it’s all about for a lot of people who love to read. Being absorbed and fully pulled into a story, letting the real world fadeaway.
What made Inkheart especially captivating to me was its central idea: that one of the characters could read a book out loud and cause things to cross over between worlds. Characters, objects, and fragments of stories could slip out of the pages and into real life, while pieces of the real world were pulled back into the book. The boundary between fiction and reality felt thin, almost fragile, as if it could be crossed simply by the power of words. At the time, I didn’t think much about why that concept stayed with me. Looking back, though, it feels closely tied to why the book became such a comfort.
Some of my friends read because it helps them slow down. They talk about how reading keeps their hands busy and allows their mind to go to a space where it can rest, especially after long days where everything feels overstimulating. Others I’ve talked to read because it helps them make sense of their own thoughts. They’ll mention recognizing themselves in characters, or discovering words for emotions they didn’t quite know how to name yet. For some, reading is an escape. For others, it’s grounds them to real life. Sometimes it’s both at the same time.
Listening to them talk about reading like this made me realize how much my relationship with reading had changed. Somewhere between those quiet mornings with Inkheart and my life now, reading stopped feeling like something I turned to and started feeling like something I managed.
School definitely playeda role in this transition. Reading became structured and purposeful. Books and articles came with deadlines, page counts, and expectations about what I was supposed to take away from them. Even when I found the material interesting, I was rarely absorbed in the same way. I was reading to keep up a standard, to understand, to perform.
Some of my co-workers who are knee deep in research, always going from one literature review to the next, expressed similar feelings. They now tie reading to productivity and workload, things they are already busy with on the regular. Reading became something that could no longer simply exist for comfort or curiosity.
While trying to up my reading recently, I’ve been thinking about what reading for fun really looks like now. It doesn’t mean trying to read more or read better. It doesn’t always mean setting goals, tracking pages, or turning it into another habit to maintain. For me, it means giving reading permission to exist without needing to be useful or impressive. Reading a few pages and stopping or returning to the same book again and again. Letting one story be enough.
I’ve also started to notice how differently people come back to reading once they let go of expectations. One of the people I work with, who is currently deep into a PhD and spends most of her days reading dense academic papers, recently told me she started rereading her old Beatrix Potter books. Not because they challenged her or taught her something new, but because they felt familiar. That story stayed with me because it reframed what reading for fun can look like. It doesn’t have to be ambitious. It can be nostalgic. It can be slow. It can be something you return to at the end of the day when your brain is already tired. Reading for fun can mean choosing comfort over novelty, simplicity over complexity, or familiarity over finishing something new. So now you better believe I’ll be picking up Inkheart again!
While for some people reclaiming reading might look like picking up a childhood favorite, for others, it might be reading the same few pages before bed each night, or keeping a book nearby without any pressure to open it. It might mean easing your way into it, maybe starting with an audiobook! It also could be letting yourself abandon books that don’t hold your attention, or rereading the same one because it still feels like home.
What matters is not how often you read, but how it fits into your life, an idea I hope to stick to. Reading for fun doesn’t demand consistency or discipline. It can be freeing if you let it be. And in a world that constantly asks us to optimize our time, reclaiming reading for fun can feel like a small act of resistance in a way! It creates space to slow down, sit with yourself, and to engage with joy without expecting an outcome. And sometimes, that’s exactly what we need.