I wonder if there is something called “Reader’s Block” when I first thought of the term but apparently there is, and I definitely seem to be suffering from it. At the onset I confess that I’m not a voracious reader or anything and the best I ever read in a month was around 5 books. So this rant may not seem totally justified for a regular reader, but for me the lack of reading is appalling me and it prompted me to vent out this frustration on my space. Sure, I read a lot of blogs, short stories, op-eds, articles online but that does not amount to the actual reading that I have set my sights on for this year. 

I usually set a lofty target every year about the number of books I should read. I try my best in setting out to achieve it but this year I read only 3 books till now and sometimes it embarrasses me. The GoodReads page tells me that I’m 22 books behind schedule. Now, I have always been behind schedule on GoodReads but it never bothered me because I was reading and that target was just an arbitrary number I chose. I toyed with the idea of lowering the target just to get myself on schedule but that seemed to be a lousily manipulative idea and misses the point.

What is painful is that there is no apparent reason for this decline in the habit. It was not due to a gradual loss in interest, or not having enough time. On the contrary, I seem to have all the time in the world, but the manner I spend it is increasingly becoming a cause of concern. It is even more disheartening since one of the things I enjoy writing is book reviews and my blog and I miss them dearly.

I shifted my apartment a couple of months ago and packed my modest collection of 74 books in a carton (half of them unread) and it shames me that it was left unpacked till date. I have a JustBooks membership which I requested them to put on hold, simply because I was not making any use of it. I did not buy a single book this year. I’m at an absolute loss as to what caused this strange block. I even tried reading eBooks but apparently nothing worked. 

When I look back at my modestly prolific days of reading, there was nothing different from now that I was doing, I was not occupied by any other things to keep me away from books, in fact the carton lies close to me but I can’t bring myself to open it. I think I would be embarrassed if I abandon books without reading them, which is a worse thing to happen than not reading them at all. Even when I picked up a book and willed myself to sit with it for hours, the task seemed too tedious and joyless that it felt wrong to read a book that way. 

As anyone who suffered a writer’s block will tell you that the best way is to start writing anything that comes to mind. It is the first and the most basic step to start again and right now I’m staring at the “Greatest Short Stories” by Mulk Raj Anand, which I picked up from the JustBooks library. It is a tiny book and Anand has been a writer I have been reading a bit lately about and hopefully I should be able to complete this book soon, which in turn, again hopefully, should get me on track.