What to Read When You're Sick
[image description: a young girl sitting on a couch reading the children’s book Guess How Much I Love You.]
I kicked off the new year by getting grotesquely sick. Everything was fine on January 1st, then the 2nd hit and I was a hacking, sneezing mess.
It was so bad that I spent all of last weekend in bed, sleeping 18 hours a day. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst was my attention span was non-existent, even for reading.
I’m in the middle of Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis, which is smart, insightful, and absolutely necessary for our time. I didn’t have the energy to move much while I was sick, so I thought it’d be a good time to finish the book. At about 120 pages, it’s a tiny thing.
Except I didn’t consider how my lack of attention span and spontaneous napping would impact my reading. Though tiny, Are Prisons Obsolete? is as dense as one would expect for such a subject. And even though it’s excellent, the condition of my body at the time meant I was re-reading the same paragraph four times and not flipping a page for 10+ minutes.
Finally, I gave up and went for some comics. Though some comics do have complicated plots with dozens of characters and several storylines, I figured anything with pictures was worth a shot.
I read
Maus
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur
Descender, and
Rocket Girl.
All of these are now among some of my favorite comics.
I occasionally had to re-read a panel, but that was far easier than re-reading a whole page of academic writing. And I definitely fell asleep multiple times (which had nothing to do with the quality of the comics) and having a visual reminder of what happened made my life easier.
I’m thrilled to be all well now and I’m thankful being sick didn’t totally de-rail my reading, even if it did de-rail nearly everything else in my life.
It also reinforced for me why I read a variety of genres and keep all kinds of books in the house. It’s not that comics are only good to read when you’re sick. It’s about having options so you can listen to your body and mind. It’s okay to have different bandwidths on different days and need to tailor your reading accordingly.
There’s no shame in temporarily putting down a book, even when it’s worthwhile and necessary. There’s always tomorrow. There’s always next week, after hefty doses of DayQuil.
