Hi dearest reader,

Lately, I’ve chatted with readers who wish they could read more like when they were kids. In their hearts I recognize a yearning for the magic of a great book being trampled with the angst of adulthood and modern expectations. (I’ve been there!) And to them I say, let’s light your spark again!

Reading is a fun, fulfilling hobby with the most wholesome community I’ve ever met. What can we do to remove any pressure and guilt you may have around reading so you can simply enjoy yourself?

It’s no surprise I read a lot of books for this newsletter, to review and recommend, and to think deeper about life. Along the way I’ve learned some tips and tricks to keep me engaged in my reading. Here’s a few of them. I hope they’ll help you too!

• Read when you eat. This method works to break my reader’s block almost always. Reading with breakfast has become my go-to ritual, but if you read every time you eat, you’ll finish 1-3 books a month. Here’s why…

  • Let’s say it takes 10 hours to read the average book. When you read during breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 20 minutes each, that’ll add up to 1 hour a day. Boom. On a perfect schedule you’ll finish a book within 10 days. No more eating your salad and tapping through Instagram stories until your thumbs fall off, wondering when you’ll find time to read (this is me I’m describing).

• Take yourself out on a book date! Carve out an hour (or two) to read the opening of your book all at once at a cafe, library, park bench, wherever you won’t be interrupted by dogs, and kids, and partners, and the dishes you should be doing.

  • If you get 50-80 pages done all at once, it’s much easier to keep going when you only have a spare 20 minutes the next day. I love reading in the library where nobody is allowed to speak to me (and where procrastinating to watch a video on my phone would feel sacrilege).

  • If you live in the Bay Area, several book bars have popped up over the last couple years. Most notable is the moody den of Clio’s and the classy, Gatsby-esque Book Society, both serving wine and snacks.

• Go to a book event! Check the calendars of your local book stores, libraries, and public radio stations who’ll often have cool event programming months in advance.

  • In the far above photo, book club friends and I went to a refreshing literary event in a theater at the KQED building, in San Francisco, drawn there by the author of Soft Core, Brittany Newell. She read new work upcoming in issue 80 of McSweeny’s—it was great, I want a copy so I can read the whole story! Newell was among a panel of 3 other brilliant writers: Brontez Purnell, Eric Sneathen, and Baruch Porras-Hernandez. You can see in the photo displaying our goodies, we left with new books by these authors! The experience was like a defibrillator to shock awake our literary longings.

  • You can join virtual book events too! This month I watched a virtual interview with Shadow and Bone author, Leigh Bardugo, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Malala Yousafzai, hosted by the Alameda Free Library.

  • PBS also has a great series of author interviews and book chats called the Readers Club Collection, such as with author Silvia Moreno-Garcia and the author of Bridget Jone’s Diary, Helen Fielding. Another option to spark the reading fire is their favorite books of the year chat.

• Get more sleep! Okay this one is serious, like you cannot read when you’re exhausted. Work on your sleep hygiene, a great term I learned in a chronic pain management program. When I don’t get enough sleep and my body doesn’t clean the soup in my skull the night before, these neurons ain’t firing fast enough for a Wuthering Heightsre-read before the movie. They ain’t firing fast enough for allusion and metaphor! Sleep is everything!!! You’ll go insane without enough sleep and you’ll never finish a book which is arguably more tragic.

• Audiobooks! Folks, audiobooks are the magic glue that keeps my reading life together. There’s always a period of time where reading words from the page. is. not. happening. Guess what that’s totally normal! I always keep audiobooks hot in my Google Play and Apple Books to listen to when these fingers refuse to flip pages.

  • Checkout Macmillan Audio because they’re doing some cool work, like creating stories with full casts, or adding unique elements. Such as The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar that has music by the author and her sister, and Future Boy, a Michael J. Fox memoir about Back To The Future, “using new interviews with the cast and crew.”

  • I love to get both the audiobook and the hardcopy of chonky books over 400 pages. Whenever I’d hit a reader’s block with Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, for example, a few years ago, I’d pick up where I left off in the audiobook instead. Then when I felt I could engage physically I read from the hardcopy again. Now it’s one of my all time favorite books.

  • Another tip for if you have difficulty focusing on a book: listening and reading at the same time helps many people I know out of their reader’s block!

• Understand your reading mood! A basic way to start understanding your reading mood is by asking yourself this question: do you want chills, thrills, tears, or giggles? Here’s an example in emojis: 😳, 🥵, 😢, 😆. Then test-read the 1st, 25th, and 50th page of a few different books to see if the prose suits your taste, right then and there.

  • To get a better understanding of your reading moods, I recommend testing out a variety of genres over the course of your life to discover your favorites. The more you get familiar with genre, the quicker you’ll find a book that’ll captivate you to the end.

  • Genre in adult fiction is a best-guess way to categorize the narrative and prose of a title. Most books blend genres so the more flavors you taste-test the more likely you’ll scoop the stories you actually like.

• Pick up a page-turner! If you’re stuck or only have time to read at night, try reading more commercial fiction. Heck read any book by Kevin Kwan. Myself, I love a plot-heavy book just as much as I love a character-driven book. Don’t let anybody tell you genre fiction and literary fiction don’t have equal value in people’s lives!!! And most people I know read both.

  • I don’t know why folks will draw a line in the sand between genres when most readers enjoy all kinds of books, from Nobel Prize winners to fifty shades of erotica, sometimes in the same day. We can be multi-dimensional babes, it’s okay. You can read Fourth Wing and still be considered an intellectual.

• Stop reading! If nothing else works and you’re despondent and the idea of reading is draining you, take a break. Listen to music, party with your friends, watch too much TV. Sometimes the only way to fix reader’s block is to miss reading. Binge-watch the Selling Sunset franchise and you’ll be filled with enough regret to pick up a book the very next day.

Ultimately, reading more is not about quantity, but it’s about consistency. It’s about making room in your life for your hobbies, choosing to spend a grounding moment with yourself and your book.

Readers have shared with me their anxieties around not reading enough, and I want to remind you not to pressure yourself too much. You don’t need to be so hard on yourselves! You’re amazing! You’re fantastic! Instead of chastisement, allow yourself to take however much time you need. Simply have fun shaping your lifestyle around a hobby you genuinely enjoy. Then gossip about it with your bookish friends!

Love,

Amani

Leave a comment:

• Why do you get reader’s block? Has anything helped to fix it?

• What are your reading anxieties?

• How do you know a book is right for you? Do you read the back, inside, both or something else?