I am the college kid who can’t read

I want to read. I want to read the piles of books: classics, fantasy, literature, history on my bookshelf, but a mental block is stopping me. This feeling that I don’t have enough time or energy. I love the idea of annotating, of having a conversation with a book, but this also holds me back from reading as I don’t feel like I have the analytical capacity to produce high quality thoughts about the books I want to read. So I don’t. I fixate a lot on the fact that I’ll never be able to re read something for the first time, and think I might be placing pressure on myself to come up with some grand analysis upon the first sight of a passage, and that failing to do so is an intellectual failure. Isn’t that kind of what assessed close reading is?

I used to be able to read several books as a child. I loved reading, I’d stay up at night doing it. I’ve seen some discussion about screens, and I was never raised that way. It was difficult for my parents to get me to watch TV. The decline in my reading rate coincides with the decline in my mental health, but that’s not an excuse, nor something I’m willing to accept as a new fact of my life. I genuinely enjoying literary criticism, and continue to do it with the media I watch, though I haven’t watched any movies or tv shows in months now, also because of the time thing. I hate that I’m becoming an anti-intellectual because it goes against everything I believe in.