It’s almost embarrassing to admit as a writer, but I once went a full year without reading a single book. Yes, that’s an eternity in literary terms. Now while I could offer you a dozen excuses for this travesty — too busy, too tired, or too distracted — the truth is that I simply forgot.
Sure, I was still consuming my fair share of blogs, articles, and social media nonsense. But honestly, short-form content is to real reading what fast food is to a gourmet meal. You can survive with it, yes. Still, eventually, your brain starts to starve for more substantial content. So, with a lack of good reading, I found myself mentally malnourished. Worse yet, my writing beginning to resemble something a chatbot might spit out after waking up on the wrong side of the internet.
In my youth, I treated books like sacred texts, each one a portal to new worlds and ideas. But somewhere along the line, I began treating them like outdated software updates. They were something I could get to eventually, maybe. Instead, I’d just scroll through memes.
Reading is like a muscle — the more you do it, the stronger it gets. Once I started flexing that muscle again, I started making miraculous connections, unexpected and out-of-left-field. Books that seemed completely unrelated to each other started weaving together in my mind like some kind of bizarre literary quilt. A neuroscience book led me to philosophy, which somehow dragged me down the rabbit hole of art history. Who knew my brain had a hidden talent for connecting the dots between completely unrelated subjects? It’s like my own personal game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with books.
Apparently, reading can make you a more empathetic person, too. Yeah, it’s probably hard to be a decent human being when your brain is rotting from a steady diet of clickbait and cat videos. But toss a few books into the mix, and suddenly, you start caring about things like the human condition and what you’re really putting on and in your body. You might even care whether the characters in your latest read will ever find happiness. Well, spoiler alert, they usually don’t. If they do, it’s superficial “feel-good” nonsense.
But it wasn’t easy to just dust off a couple of books and force some reading on myself. My brain became so used to the instant gratification of the internet that it rebelled at the idea of spending hours with a single, static narrative. Still, I persisted. Soon enough, the books started working their magic. Suddenly, my writing gained layers again — a third dimension of nuance that went missing far too long. It’s amazing what a little intellectual nourishment can do.
However, when it comes to reading. I can’t read more than one or two books at a time. If I try to read multiple books around the same time, my brain decides to go on strike. I’ll read the first 20 pages, get bored, put the book down, and never pick it up again. More likely, I’ll get halfway through and abandon it for months. Then I’ll feel compelled to start over from the beginning — only to abandon it again. Clearly, it wasn’t that captivating the first time around, anyway.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that my reading habits were the problem. In junior high, my reading comprehension was at an all-time low. I could speed-read through books just enough to pass a test, but then immediately forget everything I’d read. It wasn’t until high school that I finally implemented my one-book-at-a-time rule. I also started taking copious notes. Miraculously, I started retaining what I read. Who knew that focusing on one thing at a time could improve comprehension? I’m now at a point where I turn to my notes to be able to take on a second book, but it has to be entirely unrelated.
My brain, it turns out, likes to hyper-focus. Give it too much to chew on, and it chokes. But give it one book, and suddenly it’s a sponge, soaking up information like it’s been wandering in a desert for years. But, if I stop reading for too long, that sponge dries up, and my writing suffers. It’s a cruel irony that the very thing I need to keep my writing fresh is also the thing I’m most likely to neglect when life gets hectic.
Reading, as it turns out, isn’t just good — it’s the essential fuel that keeps my writing engine running. It’s the antidote to the intellectual rot that sets in when I spend too much time away from books. While I may never be the kind of person who can juggle multiple books at once, I’m okay with that. At least I’m reading again, and my writing is all the better for it. Without reading, I’d likely be writing Hallmark cards instead of essays.
~ Amelia Desertsong
