This is Part 4 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here! For Part 3, click here! One more week to go after this, and this series will be done for now!
As I began to commonplace and focus on the things I could glean from books, the types of books I read began to change. This was not something I thought would come as a result of backing away from social media, but a result it became nonetheless.
I was not a reader as a child, so if you have a reluctant reader, fear not! The reading bug bit me around Junior High when middle aged women from church started sharing their Christian romance fiction books with me (you know I rode that Amish romance train all the way through high school!) I moved to YA at some point, and then got sick of love triangles and opted out forever. I read lots of Dean Koontz, and scary books.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I would trek to the library every weekend and tell my husband that I had to read as much as I could since I wouldn’t be reading much after having a baby. How right I was! I gave up on it all after he was born after blazing through historical fiction, memoirs, mysteries, horror, and a few classics thrown in during his pregnancy. It wasn’t until I lost my 3rd child, Ezra, that I picked up books again. I needed to escape as I mourned his loss and I found myself crawling into bed with my two little ones every day at nap time and a book. There wasn’t one particular genre. It just had to be different from real life in America because I was hiding from reality in books.
From there I discovered the joy of free audiobooks from library apps and I couldn’t be stopped. Like all nice housewives in happy marriages, I turned to murder mysteries. When you’re already living your fairy tale, romance books just don’t cut it, you gotta go full murdery books. And so for many years, that’s almost all I read. Mystery after thriller after murder, en masse. Fun, intriguing, escapist, but generally not very challenging.
A few years ago I challenged myself to read several non-murdery books in between the thrillers, and I also joined a book club. These got me reading a little more widely and I began to enjoy other books. My horizons broadened when I didn’t get to just sit in my happy little niche, and was “required” to read another person’s choice of book.
So what does this brief history on my reading habits have to do with moving away from socials and time wasting apps? The more I moved away from those things, the more capacity I had to read harder things. The more I read harder things, the more quotes I had to place in my commonplace. I had to chew through my books and their worldviews and themes with no one to tell me what to think about them. I had to do the thinking on my own.
I realized I was averaging 52 books a year, and if I lived to 80, I only had about 2,000 books I could read before I left this world. I realized the books I read needed to be worth it. And so I went from a 90% thriller book diet to a 5% one. I have read books I loved, books that I have suffered through, and many books in between.
I now start every day in my comfy, used brown tweed reading chair with a stack of religious books, and end each day reading something easy in bed. I’ve taken Steinbeck and Churchill to the gym, Brontë on car trips, and essays on classical education to waiting rooms. Hugo helped me remodel a bathroom, and Neil Postman and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept me company while painting baseboards.
Freeing up my mental space and precious time from scrolling got me through the longest book I’ve ever read (Les Miserables), one of the most emotional books I’ve read (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and finding one of my favorite books of all time (East of Eden).
It may sound crazy that giving up Instagram led me to read the classics, but it actually happened! The domino effect was bigger than I imagined it would be!
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