Reading habits

Part of the reason why I started re-reading my bookshelf, and consequently starting this blog, is because I simply do not read as much as I used to, and that is sad. In my 1L year of law school I stopped reading for pleasure entirely, which if you know me, was a huge deal. Reading was my identity all throughout my life, I could easily read a book a day, if not more, right up through college. Law school changed all of that: I didn’t have the energy for words after I was done, whether it was my own writing, or reading. And that is a sad, sad thing. 1L year was miserable for a lot of reasons, but partially because I no longer felt like myself. My favorite calming past-time of reading was no longer calming; it was stressful and I had no attention span. I don’t know what’s changed, now that I’m beginning my 3L year–possibly I’ve learned how to manage my time better, partially I’ve just given up being as anxious about school as I once was when I started, possibly because getting back on the bicycle of reading, as it were, happened sometime during the middle of my 2L year, and hasn’t stopped since.

So now I feel like a whole person again, but then, why go through books I’ve already read? The reviews will generally be skewed towards the positive, because I have limited space in my tiny apartment and tiny bookshelf, and so only the books I love the most ended up migrating here with me from my parents’ house. I’ve had to explain the concept of re-reading books to more than a few people who didn’t understand. When you love words, it’s not boring to re-read a book again: part of the pleasure is slipping back into those same words, the same story, but gaining something different from those familiar pages every time. If I love a book enough, it’s never been a chore to re-read; there are some books that I’ve re-read every year for years on end.

This is partially why I’ve started this project. Part of it is just because there’s no point in lugging all of these books down to the city if I’m not going to read it. Part of it is that I really do stick with things more when they’ve an organized structure (like reading through things in a particular order, or keeping a blog). And so, once finals end next Wednesday (I’m currently studying for Sales and it is rather crimping my reading!) hopefully I’ll get fully into the swing of things here.