reading, and waking up

published: 2025.02.02
tagged: reading
by mana

today I just want to sing the praises of SOFA again, as I’ve been trying to impement this way of thinking lately.

I have trouble giving up on things. I know that sounds ridiculous with how many unfinished & half-started projects I have going on at any given time, but deciding when to call something quits has always been a struggle for me.

you see, I’m the type to “stick with it ‘til the bitter end,” for better or for worse, which means even if I’ve effectively given up on working on something or decided it’s not interesting to me anymore, I still keep things on my mental “to-do” list, which causes it to stay super long and imposing, which results in lots of stress!! which is super not fun!!!!

anyway, I started reading Spring Snow a few weeks ago and the book just hasn’t grabbed me yet. I’ve found it just not compelling at all, which I don’t think says anything about the author so much as myself – I just haven’t been able to find the motivation to keep going.

I suspect part of the reason for this is the protagonist reminds me of someone I stopped associating with last year, someone whom I had considered a close friend, who turned out to be not at all who I thought they were.

these things happen, and I’m through being angry with myself for “hanging in there” so long even when all the cards were laid out and I knew who this person was, but reading a story from the point of view of someone like that, I just found to be completely irritating and unrelatable.

I’ve never really had this issue with books before, if I’m honest. When I was younger, pretty much anything I picked up, I could find myself reading for a long while. but ever since I became an adult, I find myself unwilling to commit the time and effort to things I am just not enjoying, which is why I’ve found SOFA such a liberating philosophy.

anyway, I say all that to say that at the recommendation of a mutual on fedi, I decided to revisit an author whose works I had in mind to begin someday but didn’t really know anything about, Yoshimoto Banana. I had mentioned in a post on fedi that I had enjoyed Murakami’s novels that I had read thus far (Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84), and was trying out Mishima’s Spring Snow only to find it uninteresting, and was feeling discouraged.

A kind user recommended some authors (whose books I have downloaded and intend to read), and among them was Yoshimoto. I had originally heard of Yoshimoto from an image recommendation chart of Japanese literature from 4chan, of all places (I believe it was from the /jp/ board, circa 2012 or so), and the name stood out to me as an oddity among the sea of more traditional Japanese names.

I’ve had a copy of Kitchen in my booklog for ages and never gotten around to it, as there were other, more famous (to me anyway) authors whose works were a higher priority for me. At that time, I hadn’t yet read any Murakami but had heard wonderful things, so I think I began with Kafka on the Shore around that time.

Anyway, what a surprise to me that all these years later, upon revisiting the author whose mysterious and strange name stuck in my head all these years, that I have begun to devour their work like a hungry ghost!

Spring Snow I read about 4 chapters of (137 of 1576 pages, per my ereader) over the course of two weeks, and am about 9% of the way through. Just yesterday, when a tension headache began to wreak its havoc on my neck and body, and I decided to have a lay down, I opened up the first Yoshimoto novel on my list, Asleep, and devoured the first third of it before my muscle relaxer kicked in, sending me off to sleep.

Last night, when I was struggling again to sleep, I found myself reading it again, and am now at 202 pages out of 332, about 61% of the way through the novel, according to my ereader.

So I guess the lesson here was not that “I can’t read anymore, it’s not fun” but that the book I had selected just wasn’t to my liking.

It’s quite strange, to me, that such an obvious thing might be difficult for someone to discern, but I suppose recovering from things is kind of like that.

In my life since I’ve “graduated” from therapy last year, I feel like a person waking up from a decades-long nap…my bones are creaking, my muscles are stiff, and my mind feels hazy, but the more I move around, flex, and look around me, thinking, the more awake and alive I feel.

I’m on track now to read a book a month, which is something I’d like to achieve but I’m also not holding myself to…the stress of deadlines has never been easy for me, but perhaps sticking only with the things I truly enjoy is the ticket to achieving this sort of thing! I feel hopeful about the future~!