It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to make a post in the Reader Struggles series! I was using a specific list of memes that I found online, but realized last September that I had reached the end of that list! Surprisingly enough, although I feel like I see memes about reading often, when it came time to actually look for some, I had a lot of trouble.
One of my biggest struggles while I’m reading is stopping at the end of the night! I have a full-time job and it is not one at all conducive to reading during my work day. Even over my lunch break, there are constantly other people around so it is hard for me to focus. I also don’t really trust my coworkers not to accidentally ruin my books, since as a group we have a tendency not to keep the staff room very clean. I do most of my reading in the evening or on weekends, and it is very easy for me to spend hours reading when I can, sometimes without even realizing how long I’ve been reading for. I have often found that at the end of the night, even when I’m really tired, I’m hesitant to put down the book and go to sleep because I want to continue the story.
Unlike this meme, it’s not very often that I’m up until 1 am reading because I definitely would not get enough sleep to function at work the next day, but I have been known to stay up way too late to finish off a book or at least a chapter. I really hate leaving things mid-chapter, unless there is a natural break point in the text since it’s really hard to find my place again and I end up re-reading a huge chunk of the page anyway to try and figure out where I was. I also hate leaving the story when it is just getting to a really good part, although I will sometimes intentionally put it down so I can read when I am more awake and able to actually focus on the story better. I don’t want to miss out on a great plot twist or scene in general because I was too tired to process it properly. There are many days where I’m actually upset to put down the book and go to bed because I want to know what happens next!
The only times recently where I have stayed up way too late with a book is when I was very close to the end, and especially if I knew that book was due back to the library soon. I think this year was the first time I actually ended up with a late fee on my library account, because I’d misread the amount of time I had left on one of the books I checked out (I think it was City of Glass), and there were other requests on it so I couldn’t renew it! I’m usually very careful to read and return my books on time, or at least to renew them if I know I won’t be able to, because I can’t stand it when I’m waiting for a book that is three weeks overdue and still hasn’t come back in! I know it’s silly because that is sometimes a problem on the library’s end, not the reader, but I didn’t want to force people to wait, especially if I was already done with the book. I can understand incurring late fees if you’re in the middle of the book, but I hate when I have finished books that need to be returned and might not be able to get to the library in time to give them back. It just seems really silly to me to have to pay a late fee on a book that was finished on time. Generally, I’ve been pretty good about making sure everything is returned on time though, and I’m actually a bit annoyed about having the late fee (even though it’s literally about $2) because it’s ruined my streak of always giving things back on time.
I think reading challenges have also contributed a bit to my tendency to stay up late when I’m close to the end of a book. With the Goodreads challenge tracker on their homepage, it can be a bit discouraging to see “You are X number of books behind” and I’ve found it sometimes bothers me when I feel that a book is taking “too long.” It is completely self-imposed pressure because there is no set amount of time that any book should take, but I’ve found that if I’m already close to the end, I’ll stay up a bit later to finish it off so it will take what I perceive as a more reasonable amount of time to finish. On the other hand, if I’m already so close to the end I want to see how the author wraps things up without being pulled out of the story and having to wait until the next evening just to read the last 20 pages or so. If I think I’ll be able to finish it off relatively quickly, I don’t mind staying up a little bit later than usual, although sometimes my estimates are completely wrong! If it’s a work night, I won’t stay up past 12:30 at the latest although on a weekend, I have definitely stayed up longer if I have nothing else to do the next day. The last book that I remember staying up well past my bedtime for was Vicious, and considering I have Vengeful in my current library stack, I’m sure that one will be the next to keep me up late!
Abyssal Librarian 