On Mood Reading

Picture this: you leave the bookstore or library with a huge pile of pretty, new books that you just can’t wait to read. A few days later you open one up.. and you just can’t get into it. So you pick up the second book… and the same thing happens. You just can’t seem to get invested in these reads, despite being over the moon about them just days before.

“Now, Erin,” you say, “you could have just chosen bad books.” To which I say, fair. But then, imagine that weeks later you decide to give one of those previously discarded reads another shot — and you’re immediately hooked.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that this series of events has been happening with more and more frequency, leading me to characterize myself as a “mood reader.” I frequently find myself reading two or three books at once, from fluffy contemporaries to slow-paced high fantasies to even non-fiction, as I can’t guarantee that I’ll feel like continuing today’s read tomorrow. And it’s not that I’m a picky reader; I do the exact same thing with Netflix shows, much to my boyfriend’s chagrin.

I’m firmly convinced that my mood is a large determinant of whether I will enjoy a piece of media or content and, as a result, I have been much quicker to mark a book as “DNF” if I can’t get into it. That said, I’ve also been much more willing to pick up books that I just couldn’t get into in the past if the premise still sounds promising – that way, I feel significantly less guilty about DNFing them in the first place.

Have you found that your mood influences your reading tastes? Have you ever DNF’d a book only to read it months later and find that you loved it? Let me know in the comments below.