This year didn’t take reading away from me—it changed the conditions under which it could exist, and that has been harder than I expected.

For as long as I can remember, reading has been one of the ways I measure my own aliveness. Not in a competitive way, but as a quiet assurance: if I’m reading, I’m paying attention; if I’m paying attention, I’m still myself. So a year with fewer books than usual doesn’t just feel like a change in habit. It lands as a quiet disorientation.

The reasons are ordinary enough. Work has demanded more than it used to. I’ve taken on caregiving responsibilities that ask for a different kind of presence. I’ve found myself drawn to making things with my hands—crocheting, counting stitches, watching something tangible take shape. None of these are bad things. In fact, many of them are good. But together they’ve thinned my capacity for sustained attention in ways I’m not used to.

This year, sustained immersion has been harder. I notice it when I pick up a novel and feel the familiar resistance after a few pages—not boredom exactly, but fatigue. The kind that says, I don’t have room for this right now. For someone who loves reading, that can feel like a personal failure, even when it isn’t.

Letting go of that kind of immersion wasn’t easy. But it forced me to pay attention to how I was still reaching for language, even when I couldn’t stay with it for long.

So I’ve adapted. I’ve read in smaller pieces. I’ve let myself linger with essays, articles, poems—writing that allows me to come and go without losing the thread. This hasn’t been a year of finishing. It’s been a year of staying in conversation—returning when I can, leaving when I must, trusting that something is still happening even when it doesn’t look impressive.

Somewhere along the way, I realized the problem wasn’t that I was reading less—it was that I was still measuring myself by an older version of my attention.

What’s surprised me is how much grief there can be in this adjustment. Loving reading means loving a certain version of yourself: the person who gets lost in pages, who finishes books with momentum, who plans the next stack with confidence. When that version recedes, it’s tempting to rush her back. To make lists. To set goals. To promise that next year will be different.

Maybe it will be. I hope so. I miss that rhythm. I miss the way a long stretch of reading can reorient my thinking and widen my inner world. But I’m also trying to notice what this slower year is asking of me instead of treating it as something to correct.

It’s asking me to release the idea that reading only counts when it looks a certain way. It’s reminding me that attention is finite, and that where it goes tells the truth about a season, whether I like that truth or not. It’s teaching me that loving books doesn’t obligate me to move through them at any particular pace.

So I’m still reading.

Not quickly. Not constantly. But with presence, patience, and a growing trust that this, too, belongs to a reading life.

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Slow is not failure.

– adrienne maree brown