Atisbos

Burnout

One thing I've come to realize about being an adult is that it's far too easy to become a stranger to books. During my last semester in college my list of required readings began to dwindle, and with it, my interest in books and class discussions. I started skimming most of my readings or skipping entire sections to get to 'the point' of a piece. Some of it was senioritis, some of it was the pandemic, most of it was disillusionment and all of it, awful.

Burnout sucks.

I remember I had this list, an Excel sheet I'd been working on throughout college. It had all these books and references that had cropped up in my studies. I told myself I wanted to read all the book on this list and that I would keep adding to this list. By the end of my undergrad, I had stopped adding to this list or maintaining it.

The list was naive. It contained a lot of aspirational reads I had at the time: classics, epics, historical analysis, acclaimed or regarded novels and plays. All academic business. But it meant a lot to me. It was one of a few places I could allow myself to bulletin my interests and categorize my thoughts without immediately rejecting them. It was a place I could flirt with what I was too shy to say aloud in class. So every semester's end, I would take all my class notes, all my essays, all my reading notes and I would go line by line, extracting every idea, every direction, every book I half remembered, and I would put it in this list. I would then categorize my list and in some cases would begin collecting digital copies of the books where I could. Unfortunately, that's about as far as I ever got with it.

Reading books from this list proved to be impossible. I found that each book I picked up would hit some emotional baggage I had and that would spiral me into bouts of depression and withdrawal. The list might have been primarily academic, but it was still my interests, and they more often than not touched hard emotional topics I hadn't confronted with a therapist yet. Unfortunately, those interactions did not lead me to reconsider my list or what I was doing. I simply thought yeah, this reading is hard, but I have to do it.

Thinking about it now, it's clear to me that the list wasn't about reading, but a plea and a hope. I wanted to find books that would give me some direction in various aspects of my life and help me confront some hard emotional topics, but I was doing that without any sort of breathing room, and I wasn't thinking things through. So when I hit a wall, I would double down. I consulted the path that lead to that book, perused the paratext, weighed my efforts accordingly, reaffirmed the value of reading that book. And when I had hyped myself enough, I would open the book and get hit by a worse feeling. I'm wasting my time.

An English major that struggles to read, that's kind of rough ain't it.

Nurture

The two years after college followed this same song and dance, mostly when I was too sad and at my wit's end. I would revisit the list like a relic in a museum, jot a note about a book that seemed approachable, pick it up, struggle, and eventually discard it. I did get deeper into the books I picked up, but never enough to read them through.

Eventually, I began forgetting things from undergrad. The name of an author, a connection between works, the historical transition between two periods of literature, and perhaps too quickly for my liking, the importance of reading. Time dragged me far enough, that the books and anthologies that sat on my bookshelf had become a small visage in the distance.

It sounds strange and obvious, but the thing that finally got me out of this rut, well it was a lot of things, but for this aspect of my life, the thing that got me to finally pick books up again was manga. And the funny thing is it came to me without much effort on my part. I had always been an avid manga reader and in an effort to curve my social media use at the time, I picked one up without giving it much of a second thought. The ones I picked had pretty heavy topics too, but they had something the college reading list didn't, they had happier endings and personable characters I could more readily connect to despite the cultural differences. Most importantly, they also had no academic connection. I didn't feel pressured to find some ontological value in the book and a reason for why it needed to be this book. It was a book to pass the time, to laugh and cry about without caring about some grander purpose or direction.

The list I made in college never afforded me the right to read for pleasure or leisure. So getting to experience that after college was honestly refreshing. I didn't have a list I felt I needed to follow, things I needed to answer, and the reading became easier because of that. Eventually I picked up other books, a few sci-fi books that I ended up enjoying even if they might not make it on a class syllabus.

Bridging

I decided to log in to my school email last week and I found an email from an old classmate from one of my creative writing classes. She had emailed me in 2025 asking how I was doing. I hadn't opened my school email in years. I was ecstatic to reply, and I was able to talk to them a little. We made to plans to hang out next month. I'm looking forward to it!

My new e-reader finally arrived, The Kobo Clara Colour. I really like it, though I might pick up a silicone strap to hold it better. I've been reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey and Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. In terms of reading list now, I just have a wishlist on my Kobo account. I try to get things on sale. I try not to buy too many books that will gather dust, digital or physical.

After writing about this list for a few days, this has been a hard post to write about, and seeing where I am in my life, I think I might post the list here. Though I might update it before it goes online. It would be less of a reading list and more of a map. In some ways the books on that list became a place I traversed, ideas I navigated, so I want to have it somewhere other than in my drawer, so I can at least admire the landscape and see where I am now.

But I guess what I want to say is that maybe I don't have to read the things that showed up in my syllabi or in class discussions. Maybe I can grow and read new things, things that interest me, and maybe I can write about things like that too, and it's not a bad thing or worthless thing.

See you next time.

Update

I got the reading list online: reading list