Something that has been on my mind for a while is how much my reading has changed over the years. There was a time when I knew nothing but the classics, maybe because those were the only things I was exposed to in daily life. Even until a few years ago, the authors and poets who are now my favorites, were unknown to me, even though they’d been in the business for ages. So I’ve come to a conclusion that like the term ‘modern classics’, I will also classify my reading into reading and modern reading where ‘my modern reading’ means the books I’ve read after coming into contact with the Internet and its vast belly of literary information.
By modern reading, I don’t mean to say that I know everything that exists in the literary world. That’s an impossible feat for anyone, leave alone someone so forgetful as me. But I’ve come to read a variety of books in the years that I’ve been active online and I’ve expanded my reading net to include a bunch of genres that I never would have known existed before. The obvious upside is finding favorite books and authors, but something that happens quietly in the background is the change in you as a person. You begin to understand yourself, your morals and values, your tastes in reading, and contemplation eventually leads you to become a better version of yourself.
This all seems a little too glorifying of the reading experience in general. But this has been my experience. Even the recent breaks that I took from social media has made me think of myself and my past actions. So much so that I’m seriously considering writing a book called ‘My Big Book of F*ck Ups’ to remind myself how big of an a-hole I was at times, times that are commoner than I like.
And yet, while this is a pretty important part of how reading affects lives, a key takeaway from my modern reading has been about how much I’ve enjoyed reading over the past few years. Conscious choosing of books, and not because I’d read them because of peer pressure (that’s a whole other discourse, btw), and consuming their content have made sure the books and their messages stayed with me. I thoroughly loved the whole experience and until a couple of months ago, I’d loved to have said “I enjoyed reading such and such book.” But then, I got thinking.
Can I really use that word in connection with the kinds of books I’ve been reading?
If I look back upon the past few years and my modern reading, I see books that made me cry become my favorites more than those that made me laugh. I see books that talked about unsettling topics become my favorites. I see books that dig up some long-buried emotions and reactions from deep within me. How can I say that I “enjoyed” reading them? And if I said that, does that make me some kind of a sociopath? Do I thrive on sadness? On the dark? Surely not!
Though the answer to this differs from person to person, much like a reading taste does, I’ve decided that reading and enjoying sad books is not because I love sadness or the dark or because I’m a dullard.
It is because it shakes me up from within. It is because I feel the darker emotions more strongly, more profoundly. It doesn’t mean I’m some kind of a Darth Vader like figure. I do feel joy in a bright, airy manner that you wouldn’t usually associate with me if you knew the introvert me from real life. But if you see my social media, I’m more often than not hyping up books I loved or the creators I’m binge-watching and love on any given day. But when a book pulls that one thread that causes my internal weaving to unravel, it’s hard not to fall in love with it.
Either way, subjects of all kinds – from the joyous end of the radar to the grim, grumpy end – can induce emotions and be thought-provoking. If these books make you feel alive without betraying your goodness or making you do questionably bad things or aren’t harming anyone, then I feel like you can say that you enjoyed those books. You can say that you enjoyed the things you felt as you read them, because in my opinion, you shouldn’t always have to look upon pain or sadness from within and resent it. You should also be able to look these emotions in the face and acknowledge them, to feel them without letting them consume you, and I mean this in the context of reading books. If you are able to do this, then I think you’ll be able to say that you enjoyed them, that you enjoyed feeling whatever the book intended to make you feel, without also feeling like a sociopath.
It’s a strange topic to be thinking about, but this question has been grating at my mind for months now and my brain played ping-pong between opinions, weighing them against each other for as long, which is why it’s taken me this long to put my thoughts into words. But now that I’ve written it down, it seems logical to me and I can’t believe there was a time I dithered or thought otherwise. Hindsight seems like such a gift, doesn’t it? 😉
And yet, it is this whole experience that makes my modern reading so much better than what it once was. These realizations, these lessons, this understanding I’ve developed – they are things that I will keep close to me for a long time. And if I enjoy them, if I enjoy my reading of these grim, dark subjects while I learn, then I think it’s worth it. Don’t you?
So that was my opinion about enjoying books with grim or sad or dark subjects. What do you think about it? What is/are your opinion(s)? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
I’ll see you in the next blog post.
Until next time, keep reading and add melodrama to your life!
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The Melodramatic Bookworm 
I tend to avoid books that I know are going to be really sad or traumatic as I mainly read to relax in the evening and don’t want to end the day in tears. However, many books that I’ve read do contain traumatic scenes or events and I do find that those books which deal with events like that live on in my memory more and can become well-loved.
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