DAMNonsense

What happened in The Situation Room on September 11th? How quickly would we all perish in a nuclear war? What if Quebec had voted to secede from the rest of Canada in 1995?

This was a tough year for world events. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to dive into fiction? To escape this world and splash into another, pondering problems that aren’t my own for once?

Sure it would! But my brain doesn’t make sense. I’ve been on a nonfiction kick ever since That One won the election. And those are the types of questions that have been bopping around my head for the past twelve months.

I always struggled to convince myself that reading for pleasure was actually pleasurable.

Lemony Snicket provided plenty of entertainment as a kid, and I tore through John Grisham thrillers in high school. Novels fell by the wayside in college once professors assigned enough reading for several lifetimes. I graduated and immediately leapt into a career slinging words for a living—and too often found myself itching to escape them in my downtime.

My love of physical books never wavered, though, and it wasn’t until I forced myself to sit down and read Ken Jennings’ Maphead last year that I finally started to enjoy reading for the sake of reading again.

I set a modest goal for 2024: read one book per month.