Finally Starting to Read Again, and I Discovered It Through “The Metamorphosis”
So, I’m getting back into reading after kind of giving up during college and going through a bout with depression post-graduation – all topped off by tearing my achilles.
My degree was History, and most of the reading I did was pretty straightforward, and most of the “read between the lines” work I had to do for my courses was also pretty straightforward. On top of that, I was a freshman when I got sent home for COVID, so I spent 3 years looking into a computer screen in order to learn, so my reading capacity was taxed and shot.
With my new goals for life and reading, I’ve started to read some more books through my local library’s book clubs. And we recently read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and I finally was doing deep reading naturally again. I was noticing subtext, and I was feeling stuff that the translator later described in her Translator Notes.
And also, when we met for the book club, I had someone disagree with my reading of the text. Not in a, “Your assertion is unsupported” way, but instead in a, “Your assertion is not my reading” way (which they then proceeded to try and argue the former instead of the latter).
There’s no real deep discussion thing I want to go into on the book – I’ve already done that with others – I just wanted to share some positivity and provide a use case for people who are worried about their own struggles with deep reading.