Have you been having a hard time reading? You're not alone.

Pandemic fatigue is real, and it has been hitting a lot of us quite hard lately.

“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.” Kahlil Gibran

The trouble started for me shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic last March. I lost my ability to focus on things for a while. More to the point, I completely lost my desire or ability to read books.

Image by Siora Photography for Unsplash

For me, that was a major crisis.

I first started reading independently when I was only four years old—simple reader texts like “the cat sat on the mat.” I read a book with more than 100 words on a page when I was in kindergarten—I can remember sitting on the front steps of our rental home, counting the words just to see how many words had been on that page of Gus Was a Friendly Ghost. I remember my elation when it was just over 100.

As an older child, I was the one getting in trouble for trying to read a book under my desk at school, for reading while walking up and down the stairs, or for trying to sneak-read after bedtime. Books were my comfort and my escape.

That held true during the painful adolescent years, when I haunted our local library. It stayed true during college, when I once pulled an all-nighter—on the weekend—to read Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and reading comforted me through it all.

I continued to read for comfort and escape through law school, career changes, and parenting. I read through two divorces and into my current happy marriage.

As a person who has been an avid reader since forever, the inability to read that arrived last spring along with the pandemic was devastating. If I wasn’t a reader anymore, who was I?

I couldn’t read any of the new novels I had sitting in my TBR pile. Even the thought of them was overwhelming. Further, when I opened them and tried to read, I quickly found my attention wandering. 

What I discovered by happenstance last summer was that comfort reading—my term for re-reading favorite books—worked just fine for me, even during the pandemic. I had picked up a romance novel that I’d read before to put it away, and skimmed the start just to remind myself what it was about. Before I knew it, I was halfway through.

Favorite books, such as Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings turned out not to be a problem for me. Nonfiction, which wasn’t usually high on my list, was appealing as well. Those literary novels are still sitting in on a TBR shelf, but I did manage to read several new books of fiction in 2020, all of them romance novels.

Recently, I’ve seen friend after friend posting on social media with some version of “I can’t read a book right now and I am lost without reading.” The anguish in those posts resonates with me, because I know how that feels.

It is only recently that I have worked out what the books I have managed to read—nonfiction, romance novels, and re-reading old favorites have in common. In short, it is that they do not cause further anxiety.

As studies are beginning to show, nearly all of us are experiencing anxiety or at least regular feelings of anxiousness these days as a result of the coronavirus. It’s a persistent condition because of the many uncertainties we are all experiencing throughout the course of the global pandemic.

We have little control over the virus. We can wear masks and keep our distance, we can get a vaccine once it’s available to us, but past that, there are so very many uncertainties. These include virus-related issues as well as economic issues, to say nothing of issues involving schooling and travel. All of the issues that make us anxious have no foreseeable end, as of yet.

With so much isolation, it is natural to want to escape into the pages of a book. My suggestion is that instead of choosing a new adventure, you turn instead to an old friend.  Just as we are often more comfortable in the presence of long-time acquaintances than we are among strangers, we can find that level of comfort in a favorite book.

I am fairly certain that one reason that comfort reading is so, well, comfortable, is that no matter how fraught some or all of the plot may be, I already know what happens. I am not in a constant state of discovering new things, and I am not kept in a state of anxiety as I wait to find out what happens next. 

If you have read (or seen) Lord of the Rings, then you already know that Frodo and Sam live until the end of the book. You are not held in the same level of tension and anxiety as you were on the first reading, when you did not know the outcome. Even when a beloved character suffers or dies, the familiarity or certainty of it renders the entire story less stressful.

Nonfiction doesn’t seem to have the same stress attached to it that most fiction does. When it comes to nonfiction, self-help books and texts about business concepts or psychological issues have worked out well for me. Biographies, on the other hand, have landed on the TBR shelf. 

I tried and failed to get into two biographies that I still want to read—apparently, the not-knowing of the details of a person’s life creates a bit too much anxiety for me. I checked out of both of them as soon as I reached a story that seemed tense or unhappy; I suppose it added to my general feelings of lack of control. Those books will have to keep.

As I stated earlier, the only new fiction books that I have managed to read from start to finish in the past year have been romance novels. For a while, I was confounded by that. If I could read some fiction, why not other? 

I realized that when it comes to romance novels, the authors all enter into a contract with their readers: no matter what happens during the course of the novel, the main characters will wind up together, and have their happily ever after (sometimes known as an HEA ending). 

Knowing from the beginning that the main characters would not only be alive, but also together and happy, made romance novels possible for me where other fiction was not. They simply lack the same level of uncertainty as other novels.

What’s a reader to do?

As the quote from Kahlil Gibran at the start of this post says, “[o]ur anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”

In the case of the pandemic, there is little we can control, which is why our anxiety is through the roof. Adding to it by introducing the not-knowing that comes with reading unfamiliar stories is one thing too much for many of us these days.

Instead of remaining upset that the escape route provided by reading novels is closed off, I suggest returning to familiar paths, or ones that are less threatening. Rather than reading a suspenseful thriller or even a book of literary fiction that could end in any number of ways, select something with an ending that feels controlled.

This could be nonfiction, which doesn’t engage your emotions all that much to begin with. Or it could be romance, which promises that the characters you are following will end up together and happy. Or it could be comfort reading, where you already know the good and the bad, and therefore feel in control.

In this time, when so much is still up in the air, having a predictable ending could be just what you need.

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