Features | Reading When You Don't Want To Read

Features | Reading When You Don't Want To Read

• Friday, 20 January 2017

I have a problem. Over the last few months I've read five of Jane Austen's six completed novels. The only one left is Sense and Sensibility, then I'm done. I'll have read them all. The problem is that I don't want to read Sense and Sensibility.

I don't know why I don't want to read it. I found a few of her other novels a little difficult to get through, yes, but I enjoyed them all in the end and there's really no reason to think that Sense and Sensibility will be any different. But for some reason I'm finding myself picking up magazines, listening to podcasts, even re-watching episodes of TV shows I've seen a dozen times before, anything other than picking up this book.

If someone came to me and asked what they should do in this situation I would not hesitate to tell them to put the book down. If you aren't enjoying a book right now then why read it? Come back to it later if you want, when you think you will enjoy it, but for right now find something else. But the thing is, I want to read this book now. I've been reading Jane Austen's novels as part of a book club on Goodreads and this is January's book. I do want to read it this month but I'm not quite used to reading feeling so much like hard work. Not since I graduated university, anyway. So what do I do?

My only answer so far, and what I have been doing, is to make the reading itself as comfortable as possible and then force myself to just read it. I snuggle up in bed an hour earlier than normal and power through as many chapters as I can before I fall asleep. It's maybe not the most exciting solution but it seems to be working. Still, every night I'm having to fight the urge to re-watch Gossip Girl instead.

I don't know what else to do about it so I thought why not ask you? Do you ever have this problem? I know there are some terribly clever readers reading this blog and I'm sure plenty of you will have tips for exactly this sort of situation so please! Share them with me! What do you do when you find yourself in this situation? Do you do as I'm doing and just power through or do you have some other secret method to actually make yourself want to read? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!