Let’s face it:

Reading is hard. Forcing yourself to finish that philosophy reading is near impossible, and your chemistry textbook might as well be a doorstop. Getting through your reading homework for the week is exhausting, and by the time you’re done, your eyes can’t handle much more. When it comes to those books that you actually want to read, once you actually find the time to sit down and enjoy them, the worst thing happens. You can’t.

There might be a lot of reasons you can’t read. Maybe you get distracted, thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner, or what you have to do for work next week. Maybe your eyes won’t focus, worn out from a week’s worth of classes, and just can’t do this right now. Maybe you just can’t concentrate, and can’t even finish the page. That happens, and to a surprising amount of people.

School is the large cause of this. Students are forced to read too much information in too short a period of time, and develop this mindset of purely collecting and understanding information, not reading for enjoyment. Students don’t get to absorb what they read. This is a crude way to develop as a reader, and worse of all, it makes you dislike reading at times. It’s hard to enjoy what you read when you’re reading chemical equations, primary historical documents, and all of those ‘classic’ books that are rarely actually enjoyable as stories.

There’s also that due to blogs and magazine articles, we’re used to reading small doses of information at a time. This article itself is an example. There’s also the influence of TV and Youtube, where we can watch stories, but without having to put in any work. We just sit back and are part of it. With time, it becomes a lot harder to absorb larger pieces of text, since our minds won’t focus for that long. None of this is our fault, it’s just the way media and technology is progressing, but but it’s making reading almost impossible.

Reading is important. Books are fantastic. They create wonderful immersive stories that if we can get through reading them, make us feel. They create worlds, long adept stories, and characters and places that we wouldn’t think of ourselves. While movies and TV shows do a great job of creating places like this as well, books have a unique way of making us part of it.

So, what can we do? If you’re desperate to get back into reading, you can do it. Unfortunately though, there’s no trick or quick way to make yourself focus. You just have to do it. Power through a book. Read a chapter a night, or even a page. Reading is a habit, and a skill, and you have to force yourself to regain that. If you’re still having trouble, try Young Adult fiction. There’s no shame in picking up books meant for a younger audience, their stories are wonderful and the reading level is usually easier. Graphic novels are also a good option, as the pictures and short dialogue helps you stay focused longer, and are a good stepping stone to get back into written works. Or, you can stick with graphic novels if you really like them. They have fantastic stories and are just as immersive as books.

So power through, and keep reading! It’s a skill you won’t regret having.

And here are some works that I suggest, if you’re just getting back into reading:

Easy Novels:

• "Carrie"
• "The Great Gatsby"
• "Gone Girl"
• "Murder on the Orient Express"
• "The Bell Jar"




YA Books:

• "Harry Potter"
• "The Hobbit" (there is also a graphic novel version)
• "Cinder"
• "Ready Player One"
• "Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda"
• "The Hunger Games"
• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"




Graphic Novels:

• "Smile"
• "The Walking Dead"
• "Scott Pilgrim"