2024: the year of the book

[lioness_hart]

This isn't a resolution, because I don't ever keep them if I make them. But I've decided that I will cut as much as half of my screen time (TV, doomscrolling on handheld devices) in favor of reading actual paper books.

I'm a book purist; I strongly dislike reading eBooks and anything longer than a 5k-word fanfic on a screen. That's simply a personal preference, but it also has to do with the glare from the screen hurting my eyes. I don't have an eReader (Kindle, etc) and I don't want one. Putting on a blue-light filter helps, but I still end up downloading and printing longer fics (yes yes I am a tree murderer, sue me).

Audiobooks are right out! I have never been officially diagnosed with any kind of auditory processing disorder, but spoken word input without either captions or a face with moving lips just completely goes in one ear and out the other. Watching TV without the captions usually works out, because people's mouths are moving. But trying to process/understand podcasts and audiobooks-- anything spoken-word without an accompanying visual (subtitles, transcripts, a person on screen speaking)-- is an exercise in frustration for me.

So it's paper books! I like having physical media anyway; digital media is increasingly susceptible to the late-stage capitalist feature of the death of ownership. I've heard too many stories of people who have "downloaded" and thus "own" some of their eBooks having them suddenly be deleted from their libraries without explanation. I am not about that life.

I used to be an absolutely voracious reader when I was a kid, so much so that I got to know both my school and municipal librarians personally. I usually devoured 2-3 books a week, all the way up through college. I was an English lit major, and it was only then, when I was required to read at volume, every day, for my classes, I found myself first not having time to read for pleasure, and then not really enjoying it since I was reading so goddamn much everyday anyway.

After that, reading for pleasure slowly... fell... away, as so many of the joys of childhood do as the wheel of time grinds you toward adulthood.

My to-read list is, at this point, about 11 pages long. And I mean full-size, 8.5 X 11 pages. How embarrassing. What better time to do something about it than now?

I've already finished 2 books (not too bad, considering all the other crap that's going on in my life) that weren't even on the list. I'm starting with the books I already have physical copies of, and once I finish those, I'll start looking for the books that I don't have yet.

I'm not going to say I'm excited, since it's tough for me to get excited about much of anything these days. But it's nice to want to read, instead of just rewatching the same 5 shows over and over and over again while doomscrolling on my phone for 3 hours a night lol.

I'm not setting myself a number goal or a page goal; I'm simply going to read, and let my intuition tell me what I want to read when. Like when I was a kid. Hopefully it'll help me feel less desperately miserable about life and maybe, just maybe, it'll be fuel for my writing.

But that's another (extremely thorny) discussion for another time.