One of the most crucial signs that you know you’re a bookworm, apart from buy-a-new-book-everytime-you-walk-into-a-bookshop syndrome and always having a book with you for every excursion, is reading slumps. We’ve all been there at one point or another, in that state of dormancy, that visceral feeling of drought, where we feel plagued by our own inactivity.
It could be, and most often times is, a case of reading several underwhelming books in succession, which can sometimes lead to the dreaded DNF manoeuvre, a fatal course of action that I am less wont to do than others, but otherwise have found to be necessary in certain dire situations.
And so it was with me over the course of the last two months, where I have been frightfully inactive with my reading. Apart from the natural symptoms of a reading slump i.e. you just don’t feel like reading because it’s been a while since you’ve been to the gym or taken a yoga class, I genuinely feel like a lot of the books I’ve read over the last three or four months have been sub-par, uninspiring and average. This meant that my usual reading pace had slowed to a reluctant crawl and the number of reading submissions I received had grown, exponentially to an unstable size.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a top ten list of foolproof techniques that will ensure you never have another reading slump again. In fact, as I acknowledged at the start, reading slumps are just part and parcel of being a bookworm. It’s one of the signs that tell you you’re just another hopeless booknerd who goes to the supermarket wearing a Just One More Chapter tote bag like an identifying mark branded in iron.
I’ve found that the best way to get out of a reading slump is just to be patient and go at your own pace. Ignore the quiet whispers of envy at the back of your mind when those psychopathic freak readers post their monthly wrap-up of twenty odd books. Even they experience reading slumps. It might be the case that you experience a reading slump whilst you’re already reading something. In those cases, you might want to put your current read on the back burner.. indefinitely (we call this a soft DNF) and start something entirely new!
Most importantly, I would advise against trying to force yourself back into a reading frenzy so as to keep up with the so-called ‘It crowd’ as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how counter-productive this is. I find it better to just accept the fact that one needn’t have to feel like they should be reading all the time.
Such feelings of disillusionment are temporary anyway and before you know it, you’ll be back to your usual machine-like #readinggoals bookworm high, so go take that yoga class wearing your all-important bookish tote bag, discover how much you actually love DIY or you can go ahead and check out my latest book review, The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton because it could very well end up being the book to get you out of your current reading slump.
