I've seen them. You've probably seen them if you're reading this blog post. There's a ton of videos on youtube right now about getting back into reading. We yearn for the paper based media. Experiencing tactile sensory inputs just seems nessissary for human well being. I'm internet addicted as much as the next millenial but I do believe in balance. What happens when you have a programmer dad who thinks the internet is the next best thing is that he had me sitting in a computer chair knowing how to turn on the computer and open up my favorite games to play them well before the age of four. The thing is I've also been reading books since that early of an age, too! I grew up avidly with both, I love both, I feel like this is rarer (confirmation bias, not actual research) but I do actually have dyslexia and while for some reason reading was something I just loved to do as a kid and picked up really well my ability to read as I've gotten older has dropped off. There's also talk about the waining ability to just pay attention to things- while I have feelings about this phenomenon and how true it is I think the fact that it's such a widespread thought in our current climate means it's something that people are noticing about themselves.
However I just refuse to give in. I loved reading as a kid and I wanted that back. There's always so many things I want to learn or just really great fiction books my friends are reading that I wanted to read too. I wanted to figure out how to facilitate reading as an adult- we as humans change, so the approach to tackling problems must change too. It's not a bad thing, it just takes some patience and care. Plus I love treating my life like little experiments where I am both the scientist and the subject of study.
Honestly my first try was audiobooks, I've absolutely sunk into a good audiobook during a car trip- but at home I found it next to impossible to just sit or lay there and only listen to the book. Often I'd doze off or want something else to do at the same time. If you think about it, during a car ride I'm typically always the driver- therefore I'm driving and listening. So I decided that I needed something else to do while listening to an audio book that doesn't distract from the audiobook. The answer's probably easier than you're thinking- I just read along with the audiobook from an actual copy of the book.
My first time reading this way was with Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. Loved this book btw. I think it was pretty successful- my library could not get me a copy of this book (whoever has it is sitting on it despite it being due, which to be honest, fair play since I have done the same thing before) so I downloaded an ebook version as well as the audiobook. One thing you do need to be careful of, particularly for translated works, is that you have the same edition of the book. I was VERY confused at first when my audiobook did not match the words of my ebook. I also both read and listened to it on my computer. Which I have weird views about what a computer should be used for and shouldn't be- but my nook had died a horrible death and I just had no other option. Despite the disconnect of reading on a screen that isn't suited for reading books in my humble opinion I felt like it was fairly easy to stay engaged and read along. I do think it took WAY longer to read this way but I also felt much more engaged with it and felt like I missed less. Plus the act of going back and having to reread things when I feel lost while just reading probably adds the same amount of time back into reading for me- with more frustration, to boot.
Still, I felt like the formula could be refined. Right now I'm reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and boy, is it good. I really vibe with it. This time I rented both audio book and physical book from the library and I am such a tactle reader at heart. I love the physical sensations of being able to have a physical book in my hand and Moria Quirk does a great job with the audio book, it's such an engaging and furfilling experience and I think taking the whole experience and making it an entirely screenless one really added to the experience.
I also did, in fact, bring the book to a vet appointment for one of my foster rabbits and read a chapter while she was being looked at behind closed doors. There's an entirely different blog post about how I feel like, despite being a short novella and absolutely enthralling, Roadside Picnic was a much more difficult read compared to Gideon the Ninth and there's absolutely something to the idea that certain books are just going to be easier to read and more accessible simply based on the way they're presented and written. just because everything was so jam packed with nuance and meaning. Gideon the Ninth has been a much slower read, I do hear it picks up significantly, but right now it's kind of miandering about as it introduces the twenty something new characters that were dropped into the book.