I used to read a ton when I was little, and I find a lot of joy in it. Even though I have more time to read now than I have in a long time I still have a hard time getting myself to do it. If anyone has tips or tricks on how you get yourself to read, please share. If not, please just share your favorite author or work and what it is about them you like so much. Do you try to bring their style to your writing?
—Aria
Hey Aria!
I feel pretty similar to you here. I am an English major, so I do a lot of reading for academics but I have found that I am so burnt out with assigned reading that I can’t bring myself to pick up a book for pleasure.
Honestly, I haven’t really had a lot of headspace for picking up books during quarantine but I have been making it a morning ritual to scroll through the Poetry Foundation website. It could be a cheesy and cliche way of finding poetry (I am not sure what is hip) but it has been really nice to sit with some new poetry over a cup of coffee. It feels way more low stakes and still very enriching.
As for favorites–I’ve reread “What You Have to Get Over” by Dick Allen more than once (can’t tell you why.) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of my favorite books. I haven’t reread it in its entirety in a while, but sometimes I open up to a random chapter so that I can revisit a story that I have always really loved.
Hi Aria,
I could talk about my favorite authors for years, so I’ll keep it short with a list:
Fiction:
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) – I love the simultaneous classic beauty and clarity of his writing voice. His writing is beautifully eloquent yet perfectly accessible and not pretentiously impossible to understand without a dictionary and a PhD in English Literature, which is everything I strive for in my own writing. This man taught me how to write formally and I am forever indebted.
– Dan Brown (Inferno, The Da Vinci Code, etc.) – I love how seamlessly he integrates history and really interesting obscure facts about different groups of people, e.g. secret societies
– J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter) – Her worldbuilding. Need I say more?
– Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) – I have never found an author who can integrate the absolute randomest, weirdest, out-of-the-box plot and characters while STILL MAKING IT BELIEVABLE as well as he can. Absolute genius.
– Rick Riordan (the Percy Jackson series) – Humor. Eleven-year-old me thought his books were the most hilarious ever written. Still stand by that statement.
Nonfiction:
– Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air) – His writing shattered me. I don’t know how to say it better than that, but his book is a must-read.
Poetry:
– Rose Devika (the car says crash) – She’s a friend of mine from middle and high school but I can honestly say she is my favorite poet of all time because she seems to take the words I had at the tip of my tongue and say exactly what I was thinking.
– All of the poetic teenagers and young adults whose poems I read on tumblr/Instagram when I was 15 – not all of them have the eloquence of a more experienced poet yet, but seeing other young people writing poetry and verbalizing experiences that I had never heard outside of my own head is what got me to begin writing poetry again as a teenager. They made me want to write whenever I read their work, which is why they were all hugely influential to my own writing.
hahahahahaha “keep it short,” she says
Hi Aria,
This is also something that I really struggle with. It is interesting how teachers and schools advocate reading, yet their constant assigning of academic required reading can often deter students from actually reading for fun. It is almost as if the years of neglecting reading for fun has resulted in my own difficulties in picking up a book during quarantine, even though I have more time to do so.
My favorite poet has to be contemporary poet Tony Hoagland, and my favorite work of his is “What Narcissism Means to Me”. I love his very matter of fact style of writing, and how he tells a story within his writing. I have often tried to replicate his writing, though I know I do not even come close to his genius! Hopefully I can continue experimenting with his style in this unit.
Hey Aria,
It’s difficult to get yourself to start anything new as you get older since you already have so many other things to keep yourself busy with, but I’ve found that if you truly enjoy the activity just starting it should be enough to get you to do it more regularly. I suppose this is probably not the best tip/advice but next time you feel like reading/have nothing to do just try and read the first chapter of a book you’ve wanted to read for a long time, I think that should be enough to get you interested and make you want to complete it. It works for me when it comes to starting a lot of things, so it’s worth a shot.
As for favorite work – Harry Potter. It was the first series of books I’ve ever read, and I’m sure I’ve read numerous pieces that I’ve found to “better” since, but I’ve definitely never enjoyed reading anything close to as much as I enjoyed reading Harry Potter.
Hi Aria,
I always love reading reviews before I start a book. Not only is it helpful for determining whether I feel the book would work for me, but it also gets me hyped to read it! The longer and more detailed the better. Bonus if it has quotes! It’s not so much the opinion that I’m invested in but the enthusiasm behind it if that makes sense. My favorite authors are Sandra Cisneros, Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Madeline Miller, Paulo Coelho among many many others. I feel like what ties them in common is their ability to merge genre lines, to move seamlessly and freely between prose and poetry. I also bring that tendency to my own writing, or at least I try to emulate that feeling to whatever degree of success I end up with. It’s the mode I love the most!
Hi Aria,
As someone who only recently rediscovered the joy of reading for fun, I can totally relate to the difficulty of just picking up a book. I like to read right before I go to sleep, because sometimes that’s the only predictably open time, free of distractions. At home, I’ve also been trying to pick up a book during breakfast or lunch instead of looking at my phone or going on my computer. I’ve been asking friends for recommendations that seem very worthwhile–like you’re already doing.
I have a few favorite authors whose styles are quite different. I love reading Virginia Woolf’s moody novels and George Saunders’ imaginative and painfully real short stories and Louise Erdrich’s gorgeous tapestries of changing families and environments. (Brian Doyle, Joan Didion, and Sally Rooney are also so good.)