An English Major’s guide to reading when you are tired and times are trying

1. You do not have to be good

Lately I’ve found myself lacking any desire to read for pleasure, which is ironic because I love reading, I do. So much. I try to make reading a habit, but as with all good habits, something gets in the way. I get tired, my head hurts, I wake up late, I am busy. I have so much to do. I run out of time. So I lie down. I doomscroll. And another day ends. 

What if: I do not have to be good.

2. Tomorrow, partly cloudy with a chance

I discovered recently that I do not have to finish a book to read. Nor do I need to start a book. Just open one right in the middle. Poetry collections offer themselves to me, patiently. Mary Oliver, Carson, Vuong, and Whitman, my idols, my elders. I read one verse, one stanza. I do this as often as the sun shines in a Torontonian winter. 

This morning the sun is shy. I don’t get mad at it. I’ve been struggling with bravery too. 

3. And I would say I love you

I used to read a lot of books on transit. It was the best way I knew how to pass a long commute, but nowadays, I wake up still half-asleep. I prefer to rest my head against the streetcar window and play music. I listen to the same albums over and over, albums I’ve loved since high school, and I never tire of them. My familiar music comforts me. It is a blanket I get to take out of bed and into the world.

This is reading too. Truthfully, it is the method of reading I should be adopting for course texts: with many returns. Return, reread, and the same words rest themselves differently in the bed of my brain. 

I open my phone to change the playlist, and I see the picture of my partner I love so much. I should be better at calling her “baby.” But, for some reason that I can’t gather, my voice would catch in my throat.

4. Fear or love?

I go into an English seminar and I speak. I speak possibly too much, without perfect knowledge of theory or history. I speak through the exhaustion that magnetises my head to the soft crook of my arm. My points are unsalient. A peer counters and I respond shakily. But I speak for as long as there is still air in my lungs. I have to. I have fought too hard for my seat in the room.

I changed my major to English after my first year. I came into university for Biology and I found that I could not breathe. I choked underneath the pressure. I cried to my mother on the phone. I told her I could not spend my life this way.

5. Because we are the ants

The summer I broke my mother’s heart was the worst summer of my life. I was in a state of crisis, and the safest thing for me to do was nothing at all. I slept in. I left my bed unmade. I took long walks. 

When I was ready, I reread my favourite YA novel. I love young-adult literature because I have been a teenager for much longer than I’ve been 20. Young adults have so much responsibility but so little power. So much to say but little credibility. Whenever I feel overlooked, I read YA to feel seen. And, when seen, I see better too.

6. [E]very thing in the dim light is beautiful

I get out of my evening class at 8 p.m., starved and lethargic. The cold slices into my cheeks. I stand on the steps of Robarts and look below. I read the land. The first snow of the season is melting. The wet concrete sidewalk glimmers under the street lamp, and I am overwhelmed with feeling.

I want to call my girlfriend. I want to tell her what I’m feeling, which is simply so much. Even the sadness and the cold are beautiful. How wonderful it is that, right here and now, I get to feel and see every thing.

My partner picks up the phone. My heart races. Her lovely laughter and voice, I read that too.

References, and reading* recommendations:

1. “Wild Geese” — Mary Oliver, from Dreamwork
2. “Beautiful Short Loser” — Ocean Vuong, from Time is a Mother
3. “Futile Devices” — Sufjan Stevens, from The Age of Adz
4. “Louder Than Words” — Jonathan Larson, from tick, tick… BOOM!
5. We Are the Ants, Shaun David Hutchinson
6. “Song of Myself” — Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass 

*Note: In literary studies, “literature” is scarcely limited to the written text. As well, “reading” is a broad word used to describe the act of consuming, understanding, interpreting, analyzing, and feeling in response to literature.