In my life, I’ve been consistently late to the party. I’ve been fashionably late — like when I started studying writing late into my college career, or waited to buy concert tickets until they were wildly expensive. A part of me can’t perform a task until the night is quiet, everyone has scattered, and I can finally hear the clock tick. The stress of that ticking clock, while motivating and inspiring in a way, has probably taken years off my life and provided a few premature grey hairs.
Not surprisingly, I have practiced the same insane habit when it comes to picking up a book. With each excuse I would craft, a new layer of dust would settle on the few books that reside in my childhood bedroom. It’s possible my mother read me one too few bedtime stories, or my burgeoning interest in writing made me afraid of anything that would question my writing abilities.
I turn sheer in every bookstore, like I’m in limbo between the tall shelves. I scrape my brain for any books I’ve heard to be universally liked, but ultimately slink over to an employee to ask shy questions. In one instance, they lead me to On Writing by Stephen King, a book I feel that I am allowed to read. No one questions a writer who reads about writing.
This feeling was only amplified when I became a writing major. I was cornered — the lies I usually used to avoid talking about my reading habits were unconvincing. Any writer can tell when someone has only read the SparkNotes of novels in high school English class. I craved on-demand knowledge, a long scrolling encyclopedia of books I could impress people with. Yet, the amount of work it would take to achieve that felt like climbing up the Sleeping Bear Dunes — you can’t pay the $3,000 to get to the top, either.
This winter break, I had enough courage to go to my hometown library. As I’ve aged, the shame of not being a reader slowly dissipated into a desire to start. No one would know if I was reading my first book in years or my 20th of the year. I sifted the shelves for a book I discovered from one of many Instagram sleuthing sessions after typing “book recs” into the search bar. Any book I feel like I should have read by my 20s gets a place on my sticky note. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman rested against the books by other “H” authors, waiting for me to pick it up with its surprisingly thin binding. How can something less than 200 pages be so daunting?
I know the answer to that with the past five months of perspective. That thin spine represents years of dust collected on books, years of turning my back to the books on the shelf next to my bed, and years of nodding along when people tell me about a niche book that I have to read.
My chosen read sat with me in my favorite coffee shop for the next four days. In a manner new to me, I couldn’t put it down. While this is possibly because I associated reading with the best cold brew in Downriver Michigan, I had a comforting revelation that I was able to enjoy reading for one of the first times in my life. This is still embarrassing to admit, but I’m banking that other writers and creatives have felt the same stall I once did, no matter the duration.
I can say truthfully that the past semester has not granted me the opportunity to read much else. I am in the middle of a book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that I typically feel a desire to pick up at the end of a long day. I have woken up in several instances with slightly bent pages under me, the lamp in my window still shedding golden light to the neighboring building. Reading feels like something achievable, something that can do nothing but good. I desperately needed a change in perspective, and somehow maneuvered to a position in my life where holding a book doesn’t feel like holding a stranger’s child, screaming at me to put it down.