Been there, read that.

Is it weird that right now I feel like I never want to read another book again? I mean, besides the book that Daniel gave me for Christmas that I’m still only halfway through, and the book a friend gave me for graduation that was a nice way to turn my brain off during wedding week, I haven’t read a single thing that wasn’t compulsory in more than a year. And I happen to be at a place in my life where I have a bit of free time, so I asked myself this morning, might I like to read a little? And I responded with a virulent “No!”

It’s funny, because I know a lot of people my age are marveling at the fact that, as newly minted grads, we’re not going back to school this week (cf. the plethora of Facebook “We’re not going back to school? Weirrrrrd” posts), for their primary identity has always been student. I’ve held my status as a student at a wary distance at times, but I have always been a reader. Always. Ask my mom what I was doing when I was three. She’ll be glad to tell you the story.

Not that I haven’t been reading, technically. I earn a living (can we live on it? Stay tuned) by reading, and redacting, and rereading. As a senior literature major, I read every word that was assigned to me (I’m almost embarrassed to admit I’m not lying about that). I read every newspaper article that ran in our paper (twice). I read my Facebook feed, and my RSS feed, and the latest Slate articles, and far too many Yahoo front page features. But sitting down, of my own volition, and just devouring a novel? I didn’t. I haven’t. And I still don’t want to.

I think I know what happened. Well, I have a few theories, anyway. I was (am) reading an awful lot, so why would I want to read more? It’s much more likely that in my free time I would want to stare at something further than twelve inches away from my face for a while. And a (tragically) large portion of the reading I did in the last year was conducted in light of a literature class (and of that reading, I had already read a large portion of it in high school. I thought reading as many of the classics as I could in high school would give me an edge, and it did, but it also set me up for some seriously tedious introductory lectures). And maybe that was it—maybe it was seeing the beautiful, the transcendent moments in the text overlooked, trampled, or garbled in the mouths of my classmates that turned my flame down lower and lower, until the pilot light just went out.

But that’s a terrible and pretentious thing to say, and it surely cannot be the whole truth. So I’ll hold forth with my final theory: that real life became much more interesting and exciting than anything I could find in a book, and that I wanted to try my own hand at the archetypal human experiences sans other narratives. Maybe I’m just Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being Earnest” carrying her diary around so that she always has “something sensational to read in the train” (I’m telling you, let those pesky narratives into your life and you’ll never escape them), but it’s a really good story. And I can’t put it down.