Long, long ago, I used to devour books like a person starved. My local librarians knew me by name, and I would carry home a precarious stack of books after every visit. School breaks were spent in a hammock with an e-reader. Reading, you see, was something I enjoyed doing.
Nowadays I can count the books I’ve read in a year on one hand. I used to carry around multiple books just in case I finished my current one. A hobby that once used to be my refuge from the world now mostly bores me. Reading is no longer done for pleasure, just university assignments. It’s sad and I often find myself wondering why I stopped reading for fun.
Sometimes, I think I stopped reading the day my local library changed its bookshelves. They cut down on the books they carried and changed their locations. Suddenly, I couldn’t find anything of interest, just stereotypical, young adult books with forced romance plots and the empty promise of enjoyment. My library, the place I could traverse with my eyes closed, the place with aisles I would lose track of time in, changed due to budget cuts and board decisions. Nowadays, my library isn’t just a library; it’s filled with technology and it has an oddly sterile feel to it. Sometimes I wonder if the change, the loss of books and the gain of computers and 3D printers, brought with it my apathy to reading.
Or maybe I just got tired of reading about kids saving the world when we couldn’t even save our own. So many of the stories I loved focused on teenagers, children, fighting against dystopian governments that when our world started mirroring theirs, I grew disenchanted. The worlds I grew up escaping to had become the world I lived in, the world I didn’t want to deal with. As I learned more and more about world issues, I wanted more and more to see change, but the only places that seemed to get better were fictional ones. Maybe I stopped reading because my escape became too similar to my reality.
I think the real reason I stopped reading is because I grew up. I ran out of free time. I stepped into a world where work comes before play at the cost of happiness. I think I stopped reading because I stopped being a kid. I grew up and joined a world where my mental health is not valued, and the sole focus is how much I can contribute to society. I stopped having time to read for fun because I was always reading for school, always working on homework and studying for tests so I could get to university, and now that I’m here, the cycle continues.
I stopped reading because reading became a luxury I could no longer afford.
And I can’t think of anything more sad.