Is Binge-Reading Bad? | Reading Update 5.20.22

Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog! 

It's been a while since I've done a reading update, so I thought I'd go over all that I've been up to this past month. Which is, a whole lot of nothing. This year is passing by so weird for me. I feel like January through March lasted all of two seconds, but April and now May have felt three times as long as they should have. I can barely remember anything I did in April, and May hasn't exactly been popping with activity. 

I think it really shows just how slow April felt by how many books I managed to squeeze in. I mean, 31 books! That's a lot, even for me. Of course it helped that half of those were manga, but still. I was really surprised when I did the final tally for my wrap-up. But May is a struggle all on its own. Even though we're two-thirds of the way through the month, I've only read eight novels (and six manga volumes, though four of those were extra-small). 

This has a lot to do with how long it's taking me to finish a book these days. A part of why I read so many books in a given month is because I'm notorious for binge-reading, or reading an entire book in one sitting. This is only possible because I literally have no life: because of my disability, I'm unable to work, and I can't afford to keep going to school (especially since I've been unable to pass my classes, again, due to my disability) and of course since I'm older, all of my friends have jobs and responsibilities so it's not like I can spend all my time with them. So the only thing I'm really capable of doing on a day-to-day basis is reading and maintaining this blog, and even then sometimes it's a challenge. 

Anyway. Binge-reading. 

It's really how I grew up. My mom and my sister were both really avid readers, and they have the same problem as me, getting so absorbed in a book that they don't notice the time flying by. My mom reads even more books in a year than I do, if you can believe it. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose. Depending on how big a book is, I can finish it well before three days time. But this month has seen a shift in my reading. Not terribly drastic, but some books that would have taken me mere hours to complete in the past, have taken me many days. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, for example, took five days for me to finish. 

But the book that has really thrown me off this month was Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. This 281 page book took me a whopping twelve days to read. Twelve days! I only just finished it this morning. And it was a wonderful book, don't get me wrong. It's not like I was taking so long to read it because I didn't like it. I just couldn't read more than thirty or forty pages at a time before I felt myself getting burnt out. 

Look, I totally understand that I'm not a teenager anymore. I can't stay up for twenty-four hours, eating nothing but potato chips and coffee, and expect to bounce back perfectly fine the next day. But I would think that binge-reading wouldn't change for me. Maybe I'm being overdramatic and next month I'll be right back to my book-a-day schedule, but I think it's important to at least document what's been going on with me. 

Well, that's all I really have for today. I'm not currently reading anything (as I said, I just finished a book this morning) but I think I'm going to pick up Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong next. I have it on hold from my library. 

Until next time, friends.