I love to read. And I read a lot. Or I used to.

During one glorious year before university, I finished 119 books in a single year. Which, having quickly done the math on a calculator, is a book done every 3.06 days.

Then university started. And it beat the life out of my reading. Suddenly, and over the course of the next five years, I was extremely lucky to even read 40ish books: including all of the desperately counted texts like “Introduction to Contemporary Linguistic Analysis” and the “MLA Handbook.”

When school ended in May, I was honestly so burnt out. I was scared for a long time that school had beaten the love of reading out of me. That it was a mistake to have taken a degree in a subject that I loved because it had turned it into work. I hardly read, and if I did read, it was out of a sense of obligation to my identity as a Lit Nerd that I would resentfully pick up a book and read as little as possible before setting it back down.

Thankfully, my ambivalence to reading has been steadily fading. I have been fortunate already this year to have read a number of fantastic books. And I was so very very very excited to look at my Goodreads Reading Challenge today and see that I have officially read nine books in January alone. I’m doing a little dance, which makes me very happy I live alone, because I’m a terrible dancer.

Mostly, I’m just excited that January has been the month of SO MANY books because nine in a month is more than I would have gotten read in an entire semester while I was in school full time.