A Year in Review: When You Can’t Write, Read

I can’t get rid of my books. Colorful spines with catchy titles pile upon the carpet in my childhood bedroom as I sort them into haphazard stacks. I have read most of them once; I have read a few an innumerable amount of times; some remain unread. In an attempt to clear out my old bedroom, I bag clothes for donations, organize photos in albums and pack them in boxes for storage, recycle old birthday cards and drawings. As the contents of the room slowly disappear, the books stay untouched.

This year has been a year of opposition: I am both grateful and ungrateful. Safe and fearful. Hopeful and disheartened. A bustling life in my temporary home of Morocco abruptly turned to enclosure in my apartment for an indefinite period. Everyone I knew, everyone around the world, was affected by the spread of the coronavirus. In past times of hardship, I could turn to a friend for advice or distract myself by going to a favorite place, left with the feeling that, despite personal difficulties, the world goes on. Yet in the seemingly endless days of March and April, it felt as if the world had stopped.

I started 2020 with a clear writing plan: organize my drafted essays, submit or pitch at least one piece a week, and revise my novel-in-progress. January and February involved creating lists of places looking for submissions and sending out a couple of pieces. All I needed was dedicated time to focus on my writing — then with the surge of the pandemic and the start of the lockdown, I suddenly had all the time I needed but no inspiration. In a new world, one of uncertainty and unprecedented times, I no longer knew how to be a writer.

I had grown up with a book in my hand, but between a summer in Poland and a move to Morocco, I read maybe five books between July 2019 and March 2020. In the early days of the spring lockdown, my reading consisted of hours spent scrolling through news articles and checking case numbers. Privileged to be able to work from home and stay at home, I was physically safe but mentally struggling. When my own words wouldn’t come, I turned once more to books — an attempt to escape the fog of fear and uncertainty that inhabited my mind. Never a fan of ebooks, I have always preferred a paper copy I could turn in my hand, but my home library’s expansive ebook collection proved invaluable as I could find nearly all the books I wanted to read.

Sprawled on my couch one afternoon, I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in one sitting. I cried my way through Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. Books with strong senses of place allowed me to travel. I moved through parts of Morocco I hadn’t yet seen in Tahir Shah’s In Arabian Nights; I went back to 1930s Austria in Meg Waite Clayton’s The Last Train to London. Through Isabel Wilkerson’s extensively reported stories of three Black Americans in The Warmth of Other Suns, I learned about the Great Migration — a part of history often skipped over in school curriculum. Lily King’s Writers and Lovers made me want to write and love a thousand times over; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous left me speechless at Ocean Vuong’s gift with words.

Upon discovering an online Writing the Pandemic course, taught by the wonderful Kati Standefer, the words slowly came back to me through prompts that reflected the current state of the world. Yet for every short essay I wrote, I read at least one book — something I hadn’t done for years. Faraway places, personable characters, and the unique beauty of each book’s language inspired me.

Back in my bedroom with the books, I enlist my brother’s help in measuring the last of my storage boxes. We determine that I can fit at least 100 chosen books in the box. One at a time, I set aside books to donate. Each one has a small detail or moment I remember; each one brings me back to a certain stage in my life. Finally, after sorting through the piles again and again, I narrow the books to keep down to around 110.

“They’re just books,” my brother says, but they are more than that. They are comfort in times of instability, hope in a world that sometimes feels hopeless. To read, which looks the same both in the present and the past, is an act that allows us to learn and reflect and become. I read so I can write; I write in hopes that my words will bring inspiration to a future reader.