The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/books/)
Every time I have sat down to write or do homework over the past two weeks, it has felt like trying to swallow a potato whole. I have been up, agitated and down, frozen, in spin cycles lasting days. I have felt stuck in myself, filled with fluttering bats. I get frustrated when I cannot think, ashamed of the brick walls between each neuron.
Reading one of Ms. Colleen Hoover’s books is basically a rite of passage for contemporary romance readers, so I suggest you pick this one up if you haven’t!
In recent months, I think I’ve cracked it. I can actually read without it feeling like I have to conduct some Pavlovian experiment on myself every time I open my book. In the spirit of dumb old Valentine’s Day, I will share some of my tips to fall back in love with reading.
It’s about the Odyssey’s Penelope and Odysseus: They’re vacationing for the Summer from the underworld, and instead of going home to Ithaca, Greece, they decide to visit Ithaca, New York. How quirky! They stay at Argos Inn in Room 214. On page 2, Penelope heads out to go work on her poems, which she does every day. “The fifteenth of August,” she thinks. “Our time here is almost done.”
If you, like me, are looking forward to some reading this summer, let’s embark on this ill-fated journey together. Will we achieve our reading goals? Almost certainly not. Will we still enjoy the act of resistance that is leisure in a society that values only productivity? We must — or perish.
It remains to be seen whether such forms of storytelling will catch on and eventually turn the physical, printed book into what the medieval codex is today.
Little free libraries offer a book exchange for Ithacans of all ages.
Back in ye olden days, I spent my afternoons maxing out the book limit at my local library and my evenings traveling to Oz or Narnia for hours at a time. The table by my bed perpetually labored under a precarious stack of novels that always seemed to grow higher. But soon enough, that library card spent more and more time inside some drawer or another before I eventually misplaced it. My nightstand heaved a sigh of relief as the pile of books dwindled to nothing.
Somewhere between sixth-grade’s The Giver (which I enjoyed) and twelfth-grade’s Hamlet (which I skimmed before the exam), I put down leisure reading for good. There was no more time for such things, I reasoned.
I took this picture of books in a dumpster behind Mann Library almost three years ago.
I often find that literature helps me make sense of the world in difficult times and gives me some comfort and solace when life feels chaotic and turbulent.