Saturday, December 6, 2014

On Reading Slumps

As you may have noticed, I've been absent for a while. Aside from the fact that school has my swamped with work (as do grad school apps), I also haven't been reading a lot lately. You could say I've been in a reading slump. That's right, those dreaded words that every reader shudders at. I've pretty much only been reading the books required for my classes. I just couldn't seem to get into any book that I picked up, regardless of how much I'd been waiting to read it.

It wasn't until I was home for Thanksgiving that I finally picked up a non-required book. The book that seemed to pull my from my reading slump was The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider. An important thing to note is that this was a re-read for me. However, it was a book I'd been wanting to re-read for a while. I think the reason that it pulled me from my reading slump was that it felt like low stakes reading. I already knew what was going to happen. I already knew the characters. And yet I still discovered new things on every page. I brought the experiences of a year between reads into the book that I didn't have the first time around.

I think a lot of us bloggers feel the need to keep up with all of the new releases that we rarely have time to re-read old favorites. We always say we want to re-read books and yet with all the new books, we never seem to actually pick them up again. When I was younger, before I'd even heard of the world of book blogging and before I had my own spending money, I relied on re-reading books for my reading fix. I didn't have the luxury of acquiring every new book that I wanted. To be honest, I don't think I even new what books came out when. I missed that.

For that reason, aside from books I've been given for review, I am going to be focusing on diving into all of those books I've been wanting to re-read. I already have a list of books that I know are just sitting on my shelves gathering dust. Hopefully, this will finally get me out of my reading slump and then, when I'm good and ready, I'll go back to those new releases (or at that point maybe not so new) with fresh eyes.

What do you do to get out of reading slumps? Let me know down below in the comments!

2 comments:

  1. The only way that works for me getting out of a reading slump is to just ignore reading. I take off the pressure to read and before long it lifts.

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    1. Yeah that's definitely another thing I've done. When I realized I was in a reading slump I just stopped trying to make myself read. Now I actually WANT to read again!

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