This is an excerpt from a longer piece I’m working on about (not) reading during COVID. I’d love your thoughts.
Of the many things lost during these pandemic years–millions of lives and livelihoods, our collective trust in government and in each other, the moments of ritual and celebration that mark the passage of time–the thing that took me most by surprise was the loss of my ability to read.
When we first went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, I remember thinking grimly to myself, “well, at least I’ll have more time to read.” I was, and had been my whole life, a bookworm in the truest sense of the word: I lived in books, devoured them. Books were my essential workers; without them I would have ceased to function properly or maybe at all. I read widely and voraciously, juggled multiple book groups, and was occasionally asked to lead other people’s groups. “Whatcha reading these days?” friends and acquaintances would ask, and I would chatter away happily as they pulled out their phones and added my suggestions to the “books to read” list in their notes app.
I was never at a loss for recommendations, in part because I have always been a ridiculously fast reader. At my 30th high-school reunion in 2018, one of my classmates reminded me of the time in middle school when, during our free-reading time, I had looked up from my book to find half the class staring at me, watching with an almost horrified fascination as my eyes sped across the lines. “Like some kind of crazed reading automaton,” my classmate half-shouted at me over the Duran Duran song blaring in the background. I laughed delightedly, remembering, and feeling the warmth of that beloved childhood identity wrapped around me so many decades later: the girl who loves to read.
In December 2019, someone gave me Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as a Christmanukkah gift. Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, but I had somehow missed that he had published a new novel a few years earlier after a ten-year dry spell. At the time, I was knee-deep in an Ann Patchett phase (I tend to latch on to specific authors in phases, reading and re-reading in a frenzy of obsession with, say, Dorothy Sayers’ Wimsey/Vane mysteries until one day out of nowhere CHARLOTTE BRONTE hits me like a thunderbolt and I dig out Jane Eyre for the twentieth time) so I put The Buried Giant on the to-read pile on my bedside table, figuring happily that the Ishiguro thunderbolt would arrive before long.
What arrived instead, of course, was the thunderbolt of COVID. In quarantine in the spring of 2020, working and going to school from hastily-assembled work spaces scattered around our house, my husband and I and our two teenage sons fell into patterns of self-entertainment as the days dragged by. My husband fixed things around the house, took up woodworking projects, and played Settlers of Catan online. My older son watched movies on Facetime with his sweet girlfriend, Romeo and Juliet separated by the continuance of the pandemic’s rage, while my younger son screamed instructions at his friends over Discord while they shot up nameless cities in a series of first-person murdergames that I studiously ignored.
In the beginning, I tried to read and was utterly dumbfounded when I…couldn’t. Over and over again, I would pick up a book on the to-read pile, hold it in my hands for a few seconds, run my thumb over the cover, and then put it back, instead wandering downstairs to the card table where I was putting together a never-ending supply of jigsaw puzzles, or open my laptop to the furious cacophony of Twitter, or find a Games magazine that still had an undone acrostic. I ran my thumb over the covers of new books I’d been meaning to read for years and old favorites as familiar and cozy as the ratty sweatpants I was now wearing for days at a time. Nothing. I opened and then closed novels, nonfiction, short-story collections, biographies, mysteries, romances, The Buried Giant. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Eventually I just stopped trying. My brain, long addicted to the soothing refuge of words on a page, now seemed unable to digest books, as if I had suddenly developed an allergy to a favorite food. “It will come back,” I reassured myself. “It’s just that everything is so crazy.”
When the vaccines came in 2021 and we all–naively, in heartbreaking retrospect–breathed a sigh of relief that the crisis was coming to an end, I thought my readers’ block would also resolve itself. But it remained vaccine-resistant, and what confused me almost as much as my continued inability to pick up a book was how little I was bothered by it. “It’s just everything that’s going on,” I told myself, heading down to the card table and yet another jigsaw puzzle. “It will come back. It will come back.”
I think you've perfectly captured how many of us are feeling about and responding to the world. As for me, I find that it's difficult for my mind to settle on any one thing. I've spent much of today bouncing between a variety of tasks, watching this YouTube video for a while, then switching to something else before it ends. Then I sigh and fret because I was never this person before.
For me the books and the photography stopped in much the same way. I too am waiting for the want to come back. The beauty of the printed word. The magic of that perfect photo. I miss the lazy days of reading and getting lost in a book. The days of long hikes to new places for a beautiful photo. I will do both an injustice until I can feel the magic again
Magic that deserves recognition...till then I wait.and hope.