{"id":9734,"date":"2024-07-24T10:13:49","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T10:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/?p=9734"},"modified":"2024-07-24T10:13:49","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T10:13:49","slug":"back-in-love-with-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/back-in-love-with-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Fell Back in Love with Reading in Grad School"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Portrait\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Editor’s note:<\/em> Welcome our new blogger, Danielle Pitter<\/a>, published poet and graduate student assistant from the Master of Information Program at the School of Communication & Information at New Brunswick Libraries. Her debut post, an inspiration to read more, follows up on other graduate students’ recommendations on how to keep reading for fun (and sanity) while fulfilling the rigorous requirements of graduate studies.<\/p>\n

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I’ve read only two books this half-year. Two. Is there something wrong with me? Am I not reading enough? Am I falling out of love with reading?<\/p>\n

When the new year began, I felt so confident in how many books I would be reading. Last year, I read about 32 books of my goal of 20 from my Goodreads Challenge. That was amazing!! And I think it was because I chose books I genuinely wanted to read. Also, several books I had read were school-related because I took two reading classes, 548:<\/strong> YA Reading & Literacy<\/strong>\u00a0and 585:<\/strong> Reading Interests of Adults<\/strong>. So I had some incentive for reading. Those two classes gave me the inspiration to keep reading!<\/p>\n

But now that I don’t have those classes anymore, it’s getting harder to find the desire\u2014not just the time and energy\u2014the desire to read. Whether I pick up an older book from my back catalog or my most recent TBR (To Be Read), the desire to read hasn’t been there as much.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>This year, I read two books so far: And Still I Rise<\/em><\/a> by the late great Maya Angelou and Perfect Chemistry<\/em><\/a> by my Patreon buddy Cave Marie. Both books affected me in different ways. Being a poet myself, I found Maya’s book to be very inspirational and otherwordly. Maya knows how to captivate her audience and readers and make them think deeper about the world around them. One of my best friends, Tracy, gave me this book for my 29th birthday two years ago, and I’d just never finished it. But something inside me told me to finish the little 40-page book already. And I’m so happy that I did!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Perfect Chemistry<\/em> literally made me cry. I’d first read the original version on Marie’s Patreon page<\/a> as it was being updated weekly earlier this year, and I thought it was such an incredible take on both second chances and the reproductive\/fertility issues that women sometimes encounter. It broke my heart to read Kai and Katie’s journey together, making their way back to each other after being separated for so long. I loved the Patreon version so much that I requested the published version from Marie when her book got published on Amazon!<\/p>\n

Other than these two books, I have been scraping by trying to read more books this year.<\/p>\n

I think because I’m doing more activities like traveling, going out with my nieces and my mom, and doing volunteer work with the New Jersey Library Association, I’ve lost the need to read. Something that I’ve been doing since I was a child, always having a book in my hand, reading in school during class, sometimes locked away in my room for hours, inhaling words on the page like they were the only things I had in my life. This hobby that I’ve somehow turned into a career and graduate school major is now making me fall out of love with reading. Maybe because I’ve been doing it for so long, in many variations. Or maybe I’m just outgrowing the types of books I’m usually into. Who knows?<\/p>\n

What I do know is that there are ways to fall back in love with reading. The same way there are methods to falling back in love with someone, or an old hobby you used to love. Here are some ways I’ve found that have helped me fall back in love with reading.<\/p>\n

1. Use Online Book Recommendations\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n

One way I fell back into love with reading was using online book recommendation resources like NoveList. The database has many features that help connect readers to books, like their Read-Alikes, Author-Read-Alikes, appeals\/tone, and list features. There\u2019s also a version for children and young adults, called NoveList K-8 Plus.<\/p>\n

Here’s an introduction to NoveList from my Database of the Week project for my class this past semester, 530: Search and the Information Landscape<\/p>\n