Dear Snowflake: What happens if I stop reading?

I am a retired English teacher.  I made my living for over thirty years reading and talking about books.  In addition to my profession,  I read compulsively–everything I could get my  hands on.  When I wasn’t reading “Hamlet” for the twentieth time or the second section of Faulkner’s The Unvanquished before teaching it every Fall, I read British murder mysteries, biographies, poetry, the Bible, and The New Yorker, Bible Review, The NY Times Book Review, and would literally find myself at the breakfast table reading the back of the oatmeal box.  I had no point of reference for not reading.  About every five years, I would begin a re-reading of: all of Jane Austen; most of Trollope; and Great Expectations.  When one of my favorite modern authors, like Margaret Drabble, published a new novel, I started with her very first one and read them all through again before allowing myself the luxury of cracking open the most recent.

A couple of years ago, I sank into a paralyzing depression from which I held out little hope of recovering.  Then I remembered Middlemarch, and for one week I was back.  Eventually, I realized I would come through, though not unscathed.

In March of last year, I woke up one morning and started writing.  For nearly seven months I did nothing but write.  For many months after that, I edited, I wrote book proposals for the submission of the manuscript, I wrote short pieces for a friend’s blog, eventually I started writing for my own blog.  In all this time, I didn’t read one book and I got weeks and weeks behind on The New Yorker and my daily issue of The New York Times online.  I began to be afraid I would never be able to read again.

I count on books; I have always counted on them.  Now I sat down to read and never made it past the first few pages.  I was restless; I needed to be either writing or just moving around–cleaning the house, walking, anything but the sitting still that reading required.  And, even if I could manage to stay in the chair, I couldn’t concentrate on the words on the page.

During the time when I was writing, I struck up a friendship with an unlikely person-a Baptist preacher (incidentally, the smartest person I’ve ever met)-and we decided to form a book club of two which would meet at my co-op once a month.  He expressed a desire to read something “not religious,” and I suggested Middlemarch, a book he hadn’t read.  Once again, that novel saved my life.  We have read a good many books together since then.  We have just finished Ishiguro’s Buried Giant and are embarking on Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being.  I am only one issue behind in The New Yorker.

So, dear Snowflake, I don’t have a list of five reasons not to read.  It’s too soon for me to understand what all that reading blackout was about or whether it has damaged or improved or just changed in some as-yet undefined way my reading life.  I honestly don’t know.  It happened; it lasted an awfully long time; it frightened me nearly to death.  Who am I, after all, if I no longer can see the world through the eyes of Hamlet or Bayard Sartoris or Elizabeth Bennet or Dorothea Brooke?  I don’t like to think about it.

Now I have written my own book and the larger book club to which I belong has decided to read my book as their next selection.

Franz Kafka once wrote that a book “should be an axe for the frozen sea within us.”  I wonder if my book will be an axe for even one reader’s frozen sea.

Meanwhile, I have just read one of the most charming books I’ve ever encountered which was irresistible to me the moment I saw the title.  This book alone, my very dear Snowflake, could make a sixth reason on your list.