Too Long Without Reading Makes Me Feel Out of Sorts

Edgy, cranky, out of sorts, sorry for myself…that’s how I feel when I don’t have time to read fiction. As I wrote about on 1/23/16, when there are periods of time when I don’t read my beloved novels and short stories for days or weeks, I feel like an addict without her fix. I know that sounds exaggerated, and of course it is, but it often feels like the right simile. Because of a very busy semester, and especially because of preparing for, traveling to, attending, and returning to the backup of things to do after, two academic conferences out east in early-to-mid April, I have barely read any fiction for about five weeks. Two novels, yes, but that is a small number for me. (I know I posted here about four novels in April, but I had read two of them a few days earlier.) Newspapers and magazines, yes, and I do enjoy those, but they do not fulfill the same need in the same way. Of course I loved the conferences, and wouldn’t have missed them for anything, but now I really need to get back to fiction reading, and in that way back to my “normal” self. I just picked up and starting reading -- well, I will write about it soon, so I won’t say the title now, but let’s just say a big novel by a wonderful, favorite writer of mine -- and I already feel substantially more like myself.