Why I Read So Much

I read the way some people reach for fresh air.

Not because I’m disciplined or impressive or trying to be well read, but because reading has always been the softest place I know how to land.

There are seasons of my life I can’t remember clearly, but I can remember what I was reading in them. Books have marked time for me more faithfully than calendars. They’ve kept me company through moves, new motherhood, anxious nights, and the long afternoons when everything felt too loud and too ordinary at the same time.

I read so much because it quiets the part of my brain that refuses to sit down.

When I open a book, the mental noise thins out. The lists, the worries, the replayed conversations—all of it steps back a little. Not perfectly, not forever, but enough that I can breathe differently. Reading is the closest thing I’ve found to rest that doesn’t require leaving my actual life.

I also read because I’m curious about other people’s interiors.

I want to know how other minds make sense of love and grief and boredom and marriage and the strange smallness of being human.

Stories remind me that the things I carry privately are rarely unique. Someone else has felt this, too. Someone else has been awake at 2:13 a.m. wondering how to be better a life that doesn’t come with instructions.

Motherhood changed the way I read, but it didn’t take it from me.

Now reading happens in shorter pieces—ten minutes before bed, a few pages while dinner simmers, a chapter on the couch while my son tells me an elaborate story beside me. It’s messier than it used to be, but maybe more honest. Books fit into the margins now, and the margins are where most of my real life lives anyway.

I read so much because books don’t ask me to perform.

They don’t need me to be productive or efficient or cheerful. I can show up tired, distracted, unfinished, and they’ll still meet me where I am. A book doesn’t care if the laundry is folded or if I answered that email or if I’m behind on everything again.

It just waits.

And maybe that’s the real reason: books feel like a steady hand on the table of my life. Something constant in seasons that aren’t. Something gentle in a world that rarely is.

I don’t read to keep up.
I don’t read to be better.
I read because it keeps me here.

If you’re a reader too—quietly, imperfectly, in the cracks of your days—I’d love to know what reading feels like for you.

If you want occasional notes like this—about books, food, and the lived in corners of life—you can join the newsletter anytime.