The Pandemic Forced Slow-down and Reading

People have complained that their sleeping patterns have been disrupted and they have trouble concentrating.  I count myself in their numbers, though it is improving as I adjust and learn to live with the underlying anxiety caused by the pandemic.  A friend of mine recently said she hasn't been able to read.  I totally get it.

When work stopped abruptly and I was confined to my apartment (since I'm in the at-risk category) suddenly I had endless hours of unstructured time.  Like many others the first week was dedicated to cleaning, and my apartment sparkled like never before.  But with that done and long walks still leaving me with the bulk of the day, I turned to books.  My daughter had dropped off a pile of them and they had been sitting in a tidy stack on the coffee table untouched.  She had mentioned that the top one was a page turner though not particularly well written, and it's that one that launched me.

It's not that reading is new to me, but with work dominating my days and evenings (fellow educators will understand how teaching prep can eat up time like no other), my reading time was short snatches, diving briefly into passages between classes, and before bed when my lids were on the way down. I was out of practice, plain and simple.  Fortunately, the page-turner got me back into the habit of extended uninterrupted reading, and now I can read more elevated text and go into what Maryanne Wolf (maryannewolf.com) calls a slow deep read.

Wolf makes the point that reading on-line is very different.  We tend to skim, searching for the information we are looking for and find relevant.  It's fast and efficient, but a totally different kind of reading, and one most of us do a great deal of.  The slow deep reading of books needs to be practiced or it gets weaker and takes more effort.

So, if you are having trouble curling up with a book and doing the slow, deep read, you might consider picking up a low-brow page turner just to get back into the swing.