Reader’s Block

From childhood through adolescence, I would read just about anything you put in front me. I had no problems with genre, density, length, or even quality. I read plenty of books I found unappealing without stumbling—I simply kept reading until they were over. As an adult, though, I find that I swim in and out of reading periods, and will go weeks, or even months, without wanting to read.

Sometimes, a particular book will trigger it: something boring, maybe, or dry and dense. I was reading Nicolas Ostler’s Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and while the topic is fascinating I found the prose too dull and the footnotes too numerous to hold my interest without more-than-average effort. Or the block comes when I pick up something at the wrong time: I had this moment with Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which was excellent up to the point that I read, but then I realized that it just wasn’t what I was in the mood for so I put it down to return to later. (I did, about a year later, and I loved it then.) Occasionally, it’s built-up trauma from a string of bad books that make me lose interest in reading altogether: those I won’t name. But more often than not it’s just a switch, a feeling: I don’t feel like reading today.

For instance, I’m about 200 pages into Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It’s excellent—brilliantly written, utterly engrossing, beautifully executed. I’m completely caught up in it. I want to know what happens next.

Yet I don’t feel like reading it right now.

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