introduction

My reading life has followed a similar trajectory to many of my peers’: avid reading habits were replaced by mostly unregulated Internet habits. I’m sure there are more robust explanations for the phenomenon of millennial former bookworms who struggle with reading as young adults, going beyond the rise of smartphones to the entangled phenomenon of rising mental illness. But I really don’t have the knowledge or insight to go deeper into that – so for now I will just talk about my own experience.

Elizabeth Taylor made me a born-again reader. I can’t remember exactly how I came across her. Even when I wasn’t reading, I was *reading* about reading – on Goodreads and Tumblr, mainly. I probably stumbled across a review at some point; maybe one of Heaven-Ali’s. Anyway, in my second-to-last year of college, I was especially anxious to “rehab” myself as a reader. I was deathly anxious in general and knew that reading novels again would help.

There’s a lot that I regret about my college education, but if I hadn’t gone, it would have been much harder* to seek out the kind of books I was interested in. I’m so grateful for my university libraries (I transferred a, uh, number of times). The school I graduated from had almost all of Elizabeth Taylor’s works, and one break I took The Soul of Kindness home with me. I immediately knew that this was the kind of writing I had been waiting for since I graduated out of children’s and YA lit. Few of the “classics” and not much of contemporary American “literary fiction” had seemed so compatible with the way my mind worked. I don’t know what I can say about Elizabeth Taylor that hasn’t been said. After reading most of her works, I branched out to other Virago favorites: Muriel Spark, Margery Sharp, Rosamund Lehmann.

I read The Soul of Kindness** in 2017, so I’m coming up on four years of more-or-less consistent, pleasurable reading-as-an-adult. (Last year was a low point mostly due to a long-distance relationship that had me on the phone all evening, every evening. Now that we’re a comfortable married couple living in the same house, I have much more time. ;)) But I feel mentally stagnant. I don’t really *talk* about the books I read; I don’t write about them. My reading life is neither social nor very reflective. I want that to change! I don’t get enough pleasure from the act of reading itself to keep it as a solitary hobby. A book’s impact shouldn’t be limited to the duration of the first read and shouldn’t be limited to the reader in isolation from others.

Obviously, that’s why I’ve started this blog. I’ve read a handful of book blogs on and off and I’d love to be more actively engaged with other readers.

This is already quite a long post, so I’ll end it there. Future posts won’t be so self-centered, I hope! Planning to write a little about the books I read in January soon.

Thanks for reading,
Sarah

_{*Ask me about the interlibrary loan system in Mississippi.
**I think an earlier turning point was reading the first few pages of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart; I can’t remember why I didn’t continue, but the sensation of reading the initial scene is stamped into my memory.}