The Reading Slump that Kept on Slumping

And the launch of operation deslump

It’s a reading slump, folks. It requires the utmost attention, the deepest analysis and a carefully calibrated strategic attack.

It began innocently enough.

It’s late 2021. I’ve had a spectacular reading summer and autumn, reading two of Sally Rooney’s novels and declaring her my new favourite author. Also, A Tale for the Time Being, Such A Fun Age and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I round out the year with my usual scramble to reach my yearly reading goal of 25 books per year, which I do. I’m very pleased with my year in books.

I start 2022 strong with Wuthering Heights, seeing the connections from that book to the contemporary novels I love.

It feels momentous, a significant time in my reading life. I’ve discovered something new in fiction. A new dimension, new favourites.

And then, it’s all downhill from there.

A bookworm grows up

Before we get to the slump of all slumps, let’s back up for a moment.

I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember. My mum put books in my hands from a young age, and my bestie’s mother was a children’s book author.

Little Elin at Christmas

I grew up with Harry Potter. I read Kafka and Dostoevsky in high school. I wrote short stories and dreamed of being an author.

Enter my university years. This is when I had my first proper reading slump. I studied political science and had a lot of course literature to get through. My fiction reading was put on the back burner.

In 2012, I discovered Goodreads and started tracking my reading. I loooooved it. I joined a student book club and read 13 novels in 2012. Then in 2013, I ended up only reading four novels, was shocked and aghast and had a vision of myself dying at an old age in a sea of unread books.

Summer of 2012

In 2014, I read 10 novels, and in 2015, I had graduated, gotten my first real 9-5 job and no longer had books about global governance and international political theory to chew my way through. I read 16 books, including some non-fiction.

In 2016 I started my blog and Instagram and reached 25 books per year - which I had decided was a decent amount for a quite slow reader like me, because it would mean reading 100 books in four years. An arbitrary number that pleased me.

Winter of 2015 / 2016

Now followed a couple of thrilling years in my reading life. I found #Bookstagram and wove together my creative projects, writing and reading. There were lots of brilliant books to discover - I perused lists of prize winners and bestsellers of the past years. I read a good mix of classics, literary fiction, young adult, fantasy and non-fiction.

Spring of 2018

My yearly goal of 25 books kept me reading at a consistent pace without unnecessary rushing (apart from a little crunch in December every year).

Until… The Big Reading Slump.

The slump I have not yet shaken

We’re back in the spring of 2021, one year into the pandemic, and I went full-time with my creative coaching business.

Knowing I’d live on a meagre income for a while, I ordered a stack of books that would last me 6 months or so. I put a lot of thought into that stack, and those first 6 months of running my own business was a real high.

Then came 2022, I had finished Wuthering Heights and I had that feeling of being at a significant time in my reading life.

My stack of going self-employed books

My slump began with Writer & Lovers. On the surface, exactly my kind of book. A contemporary, character driven novel about a distraught young woman writer and her complicated relationships. And it was… okay. It took me two months to finish, had its moments but and I didn’t enjoy it that much.

And that’s how it’s kept going on, with a few exceptions. Okay novels that have taken me two months to finish. In December of 2022, I decided not to crunch for my 25 book reading goal, instead settling at 23 books. It wouldn’t be noteworthy, except it was a sign of my dwindling enthusiasm for reading.

Summer of 2018

In an attempt to break out of my reading slump, I lowered my reading goal for 2023 “to focus more on quality reads”, because I thought it might be a better strategy. But I’ve struggled just as much this year, if not more, and with less than a month left of the year, I’ve only finished ten books, six of them novels. The last time I read this little was a whole decade ago.

Now, this is not about the numbers. It’s about my love for fiction, about wanting to make reading a priority in my life. Reading goals and tracking has helped with that over the years, and fewer finished books in combination with lukewarm feelings about the ones I have finished are clear signs of an unsatisfactory reading life for me.

Winter of 2018 / 2019

Being in a reading slump is a very sad experience for a bookworm. So I’ve thought long and hard about why I’m in one and why it has persisted. My conclusion is that it has been a perfect storm of multiple things affecting my reading life at once. One or two wouldn’t be enough on their own, but together, they’ve become a powerful force.

Let me present: the problems

• I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind. My reading slump began when self-employed life started to feel really challenging and since then, I’ve gone through multiple changes, getting a part time job and then going full-time with it, plus personal challenges along the way as well. It has made me a distracted reader.

• My reading habit was not firmly rooted. During the pandemic, I stopped commuting to work, which used to make up a large portion of my day to day reading, and I hadn’t established a clear habit to replace it.

• My taste in books was in flux. Having discovered next level favourite books made it clear that there was a specific type of book that I loved the most, yet I struggled to define exactly what it was and how to find it again.

• My taste diverged from my former sources of inspiration. Around the same time, Booktok started trending, and my reading taste diverged from Goodreads’. I found it increasingly difficult to discern which books I would enjoy and which I would not.

• Slow reading became a downward spiral. So-so reads made me a slower reader, and the less I read, the less interested I got in the book I was reading. I became scared of picking the wrong book and being “stuck” with it for two months.

• I’ve picked my next read with less intention. I used to spend hours choosing which books to read next and organising my to be read list. Being confused about my taste in books, finding others’ reviews less helpful and being generally less enthusiastic about reading, I’ve not known how to pick books, and so my choices have been more random and less thought through.

• I’ve stopped creating content about my reading. I’m sure that being in the Bookstagram community helped me get into the habit of reading more around 2016-2017. But shifting my focus to coaching and building a business, I stopped sharing pictures of books I was reading. It was one less thing to keep my reading inspiration high.

• I’m super bad at DNFing. A book has to be really really bad for me to not finish it. Unfortunately, that has meant I’ve read a lot of books I’ve found mediocre the past years. Which hasn’t exactly helped with the reading slump.

Summer of 2018

I have started to desperately look for that delicious feeling of a really, really good book. That deep urge to pick it up, the tearing through the pages, the disappearing completely in the story, the ranting to my poor fiancé about the brilliance of a character arc, the bittersweet book hangover afterwards.

I tried picking “safe” books, to propel me out of the reading slump.

• Books by authors I have read and loved before

  • The Glass Hotel, Eileen, Less is Lost, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

• Books that were described as similar to books I had enjoyed

  • Miracle Creek, Rivers of London

• Books that I thought might be light and fast-paced reads

  • Anxious People, Finlay Donovan is Killing It, Six of Crows

It has not worked out well at all. In these past two years, I have read three novels that I genuinely loved - Piranesi, The Book of Form and Emptiness and Sorrow and Bliss. The rest, I’ve had lukewarm feelings about.

And I’ve had enough. It’s time to tackle this reading slump head on.

Operation Deslump has begun

I’ve been in denial. I’ve thought the end of the reading slump would be just around the corner of the next book. There have been good weeks, good books, and I’ve thought phew, now it’s over. Then it has come back. And I haven’t talked about it. Honestly, I’ve been ashamed about it. Which is silly, I know.

The first step is acceptance. Here we are.

Hello, my name is Elin, and I’m in a reading slump.

[Rumbling in the distance from behind phone screens and laptops. Hello Elin.]

Now here’s what I’m going to do about it.

• I really need to start DNFing. Yup. I know. It’s time. I can’t keep reading books I don’t care much about. I find this ridiculously hard, because I’ve read so many books that were slow the first half and then ended up being wonderful. But a reading slump is not the time for those books. I need to say: fine, but not now and put it back in the bookshelf. Or at least switch to audiobook format.

• More audiobooks. I already listen to audiobooks for almost all of my non-fiction reading, and I’ve had much less of a reading slump in that department. It definitely helps me keep the pace up and not get stuck in books.

• More perusing books. I want to get back to meticulously organising my TBR list and choosing which books go with which season. Tap back into the nerdy fun. Have books lined up that I’m excited about reading.

• More bookish inspiration overall. Listen to bookish podcasts (I like The Currently Reading Podcast and Literary Friction), follow some new bookish accounts on Instagram, make cute bookish notes in my calendar, make inspiration Pinterest boards, reorganise my bookshelf, buy new bookmarks. If it’s bookish inspiration, it’s good.

• Keep looking for my faves but also read widely. After discovering my new favourites, I’ve tried to find more books in that little sliver of a sub genre (which I currently define as sad girl lit with simple prose, heavy subtext and spot on cultural observations). Which isn’t entirely easy, and I can’t read only that genre. So I want to spend more time finding interesting books in different genres. Who knows, maybe a crime thriller series will be my savour? Well, not me unless I try.

• Alternating lighter immersive reads and quality literature. During my best reading periods, I had a system of reading one lighter book followed by one more literary. During my reading slump, I feel like I’ve done neither. I’ve avoided books that I suspect will be more demanding, yet not found the really fast paced ones either. And I’ve sometimes refrained from reading books I think I might love, because I fear I’ll ruin them with my bad reading mood. No more. Time to once again alternate immersive, emotional, fast paced reads and literary works.

• Raising my reading goal back to 25 books per year. This is a reading pace that suits me and keeps me reading, so I don’t fall out of the habit or get bored of my current read.

• Write about how operation deslump goes. I vow to give you updates on how it’s going. I’d like to get back some of the Bookstagram energy. I need the accountability and inspiration.

Winter of 2017 / 2018

Right now, I’m reading The Details, a slim Swedish price-winning character study. It’s good. Not perfect, but good. Once that’s finished, I’m aiming for something fast-paced. Maybe a YA fantasy. I’m going to spend an embarrassing amount of hours moving books around on my TBR before I decide.

Wish me luck.

Winter of 2023 / 2024 - the season I get out of my reading slump?

Have you been in a reading slump? What helped you get out of it? What books have you read and loved lately?