An avid reader, starting over (pt. 1)

It’s a banner day for me, equally tragic and triumphant: I’ve finished the first five books of the Wings of Fire series! (“The WHAT series?” you might ask. Just ask any random child ages 7-12. I guarantee that they will know about this series and will have Many Thoughts.)

The tragedy is that these are the first new books I’ve read since June 29, 2023, when my head + eye pain got too intense to focus and/or keep my eyes open. And it wasn’t until the end of November that I even managed to start Book One. The triumph, of course, is that I did it, and that I am now able to converse fluently with said random children about various dragons and their tribes. But - oh - how bittersweet!

Not being able to read for pleasure is the single biggest way my life has changed in the past seven months. I’ve had time off teaching before (huzzah, fellowships and sabbaticals!), and off research (my first two+ decades, if we count working on a dissertation as the onset of the relentless academic ‘push to publish’), but I literally cannot remember a time when there wasn’t at least one book I was in the middle of, enveloped in the sheer joy of moving through worlds and personalities and experiences. I may have learned the ‘facts of life’ from my mother, but I learned what those facts were supposed to feel like from reading books.

(Bookshelves in our living room back in Michigan.)

At first, not reading was an uncomfortable novelty. “I haven’t gone this long without reading a physical book since I was in kindergarten!” I marveled to Andy, maybe a week into ER visits, when the blisters from shingles had already colonized a large triangle of left scalp-forehead-eyelid-eye and were determinedly building roads and schools on their way to the tip of my nose. Since my left eye was more or less swollen shut and I was in breathtaking pain, it was hardly a shock that I wasn’t attempting either of the books I’d brought with me on our trip to the UK, but it still felt deeply alien to being ME not to be reading.

As the blisters subsided, the pressure in my left eye began to increase rather than decrease, and then the vision in my right eye went haywire and more drama ensued (a tale for another post), and there was hospitalization and meningitis…and still, the change I felt the most was the lack of reading every night before I went to sleep.

It really was the lack of reading I experienced, not a lack of books: I was listening to audiobooks almost constantly. Really, there’s not much else to do when any amount of light hurts your eyes and you’re generally in too much pain to move around. I slept and listened to audiobooks. Listened to audiobooks and slept. If I could get into just the right position and the audiobook was just soothing enough, I could push the pain ‘out’ far enough that it wasn’t demanding my constant attention: bliss.

Fast forward to the end of November. I’d made it through two multi-week rounds of IV antiviral infusions, and was finally on the mend. Well, on the mend physically, at least - this was when various effects or ‘sequelae’ of my brain infection started to manifest (in the sense of both appearing and becoming clear to us). And one of those effects was that I had a really difficult time reading anything dense or complex.

I received the page proofs for an article I’d written in the ‘before’ times, for instance, and thought that since I’d written it and knew exactly what it said, I might be able to make my way through it. What happened when I tried to read it was one of the strangest experiences of my life: I opened the file, and almost as soon as the formatted-for-press document appeared, I had this intense sensation that the text was TOO CLOSE. I tried enlarging it, so fewer words would appear on screen, to see if that would make it feel less overwhelming. It did not. It just made me feel even more strongly that the words were shouting at me, and I couldn’t get far enough away from them. I tried making the document as small as I could read (given how messed up my vision still was), but that didn’t make a difference either. The words were TOO MUCH. They were asking my brain to act in ways it didn’t remember, and as I kept trying to read the introduction (just the freaking introduction!), my entire body was now begging me to GET AWAY.

Before I could really process what was happening, I was on the other side of the room, my fight-or-flight instinct fully activated, panting for oxygen. Andy came running in from the study - apparently I’d called him? - and tried to figure out what had just attacked me. “My paper on transformation via mystical experiences in the lives of two late thirteenth century women!” was not an answer he expected. (Ever the ideal academic husband, however, he ended up reading through the page proofs for me so I could make the press deadline.)

It was at this rather dismal juncture that I decided it was time. to. start. over.

Clearly, I wasn’t going to be jumping back into philosophical or historical works any time soon. And even ‘grown-up’ novels were too complex, in both formatting and what they demanded from my brain. Fortunately, I am a huge fan of YA (young adult) literature, and my ten-year-old nephew Seth had been begging me to read the Wings of Fire books - his absolute favorite - for ages, so we could talk about them.

The series is actually pre-YA: more late elementary school to middle school. But if I was really going to start over and soothe my reading brain into coming along for the ride, what better way than with books that had an eager conversationalist waiting for me to join the fun? Plus, I love dragons. Honestly, it was a pretty easy sell.

This post has gotten long, so in my NEXT post, I’ll describe what it was like to try to read those books. Interestingly, I think many of the features that make them so appealing to young readers is precisely what made them work so well (eventually) for ABI-me.

Until then, be gentle with your brains!