Reading

The last time I wrote about reading, I was worried I might not be able to engross myself in a book the same way I have before. Dear reader, to my delight, that worry was unfounded—as I also speculated at the time. On Saturday I finished the Red Queen tetralogy (yes, I had to look up that word too, four books), a journey I had only began two weeks prior. Now that I think about it, I think all of the four books actually took pretty exactly two weeks, I think I began reading on a Saturday evening as well.

I ended up enjoying the books quite thoroughly, even if it felt that they were part of a rather familiar pattern at this point and I still have mixed feelings about the decision to include several perspectives in the later books. Yes, there is undoubtedly merit to it, and there were certainly characters it gave me a greater appreciation for, but it still felt like a diversion a lot of the time. As for the familiar pattern, the book felt very reminiscent of others like Hunger Games or Divergent (basing that somewhat on the movies, haven’t actually ended up reading those books, but still). This isn’t a bad thing, just something to be aware of if you end up considering reading these books. They also felt very young adult, which I think is exactly what I need at the moment, but also something to be aware of.

The only problem I have now, which I ended up feeling after finishing Pillars of Eternity II as well, is that odd void that appears after having spent such a long time in another world I can no longer enter. It of course opens the way for new and interesting experiences in the future, especially since I know again that this is something I can still do if I find the right book for it, but there is still a certain sadness to every end that makes it somewhat difficult to begin something new in order to avoid that feeling.

Thinking back, that might have been the reason I have had such difficulty reading before this, simply the fear I suppose of loss that comes when leaving these worlds that end up feeling almost more like home than the real one for a short while. It probably also doesn’t help that I still have several books that I started reading but never finished, partially because they are a part of unfinished series that I decided to wait for to be finished so that I could devour them more efficiently at my own pace instead of waiting for the author, but also partially because for whatever reason those books didn’t end up resonating with me on a sufficient level for me to just read through them, simultaneously making every new book I began a betrayal to the unfinished ones, making it ever more difficult to enjoy new books. I will probably have to take another look at my backlog of started books and reconsider if I truly do want to read them, and if not actually mentally check them of my todo list so that they don’t end up haunting me in the future, learning to let go as it were.

It feels like, I might have made one of those classic blunders of spring: underestimating how cold it still is. The last probably week or more, I have felt more or less a bit down as far as energy goes, and a bit of a stuffy or runny nose. Now I know what one might suspect, that it might be the great spectre of our times, COVID-19, but I think the likelyhood for that is extremely low, considering the measures I take to be safe. Even if it were the case, it would seem I am one of the lucky ones, considering how long I have been in this state and no worse symptoms appearing so far.

It does have the unfortunate side-effect of making it a bit more difficult for me to actually enjoy spring, since I’m less likely than before to go out and enjoy the rather good weather we have been having here for the most part, but to be fair that is something I’m generally not all that likely to do—even if I do still want to get into the habit of doing some more exploring.

There is another somewhat strange thing accompanying all of this, namely I have been noticing lately a certain difficulty in falling asleep lately, and wasn’t initially quite sure what to attribute it to: mental health state, stress, or what? But it is slowly dawning on me, that the most obvious change has been a increase in evening mental activity on my part, in this case in the form of reading more again, a couple of hours before going to sleep. Now it has been very nice to be reading this much again and I have certainly missed it just like I had missed playing a good RPG, but I think I need to come to terms with the fact that it is actually a highly stimulating activity for me when it is as interesting as it is at the moment, which means I need to take some time to recover afterwards before going to sleep. It’s funny in a sense, having reading which seems so passive be something I need to recover from, but I guess adventures in other worlds are anything but relaxing.

There is another rather fortuitous link between these two things, namely taking a day and just hanging out in bed reading seems like a rather splendid idea in order to try to recover from whatever ailment I might be suffering from at the moment, maybe even several days. I shall try this, then, and hopefully by this time next week I am feeling somewhat better, hopefully once more in more of a mood to do other things than just reading. It is the most excellent of distractions though, whisking me away from life as it is to the troubles of someone else, the worries of my own fading away for a moment, replaced by the adventures of others, comforting in their distance.

I recently found a little time to do some reading again, partially inspired by my mother who had done it as well, and I have to say there is something really calming about it even if the material I was reading this time around wasn’t such a light read for me. I really don’t know what it is about it, but it just seemed to have a very relaxing effect for me—or perhaps I managed to read because I felt relaxed in the moment?

This, of course, makes me somewhat sad that to a great degree I seem to have lost the ability I had in my youth of simply engrossing myself completely in a book and doing nothing else days on end than reading, but perhaps this is also a matter of not having found the right book for that in a long time. To be fair, I have also done a lot less looking for that book now than in earlier times, and at least as far as gaming goes I think Pillars of Eternity II proved to me that the capability to engross myself in something so completely is still there if I find the right story to focus me.

Perhaps a part of this is as well, that the kind of books I have been reading recently have mostly been with some sort of learning in mind, either directly through the content of the book or indirectly through the books language, which while fun in its own right is still draining to a degree which makes it that much more difficult to simply engross oneself in the content. At the same time, the last book I’ve read, Because Internet, was also purely research and factual yet I did enjoy that read greatly and felt more limited by the time I had available than the content of the book in my reading speed.

So perhaps that is merely the problem, me not having prioritised reading to a sufficient degree to actually go and search books I want to read sufficiently badly in order to actually keep on spending whole days doing that, along with not necessarily having those full days to spend on such an activity—or at least not setting aside a whole day for something like that, I did do it with gaming and Pillars as well as more recently World of Warcraft during the new expansion launch.

It is often said that identifying the problem is half of the solution, so now that I have done that do I think anything is likely to change for me? At the end of the day, probably not. I still enjoy reading and there is definitely a desire in me to find more of those moments where I can sneak away a page or twenty, but those day-long marathons are not likely to feature prominently at least in my imminent future due to other priorities at the moment, gaming and otherwise. Still, knowing that the potential is still probably there is also something of a comfort, and maybe one day in the not-too-distant future I will once again make use of it.