Some thoughts on reading at 30

There's something to be said for a 30-year-old's approach to serious literature, especially for someone who, like myself, has only come to literature with such gusto fairly recently. Of course, I've been reading books my whole life, and have been reading literature since, well, studying English as an undergrad. In my case, however, I didn't really start to appreciate it, or focus so much of my reading attention on it, until the past couple of years. I used to focus my mental energy on reading history, news, current events & politics. I was more concerned with acquiring facts and less interested in exploring subjective experience the way you can with fiction. It's only lately (as I mentioned in a previous post) that I've been more interested in reading novels than history & non-fiction books. And it's the thoughts about what this means that have prompted this post. I've switched to second-person. It was unintentional at first, but I kept it that way because I like how it depersonalizes the thoughts, changing its effect from that of a confession that of a profile.

Reading fiction at 30 still affects you – otherwise you wouldn't still do it – but you take it less seriously than you did at 30. You still have the innocence that allows you to be excited by new writers and ideas, but your outlook is tainted by a bit more maturity and experience than it was at age 20 or younger. You're more skeptical of ideas, more practical about life, less impressed with self-indulgent thought and less inclined to lose yourself in your own thoughts because you have bills to pay, friends to see, relationships to maintain – you spend more time living life than contemplating its meaning. Or, even if that balance hasn't changed since you were 20, you feel less guilty about it now.

You're not unhappy but you're somewhat disillusioned because you've seen that the world isn't a place where you can really do whatever you want, unless you're damn focused and you work your ass off and you're extremely talented and, of course, lucky. You have less patience to read books like Ulysses and anything by Henry James because the feeling that life is short is no longer creeping up on you but has already tapped you on the shoulder to get your attention. Not that you're old, not by any means, but when you're 30 as opposed to 20 the future you'd always imagined is here, even though you weren't expecting it and it doesn't look quite like you'd pictured, and by seeing this future for the first time you realize that the next future will also be here before you're ready.

As a 30-year-old reader of literature the realization that your time is not unlimited means you're less concerned with impressing people with the books you've read than you are with using your remaining days the best you can. You're less likely to read a book you want to "have read" even though you won't necessarily enjoy the process of reading it because reading a book you "should" read or want to "have read" is something done by a mind that's preparing itself for something, that's looking towards the future. It's a sign that you want to accomplish things, be seen a certain way, read those classics so that you get all the intertextual references to and quotes from Ulysses and Proust that you're sure to come across later on. When you're 30 that's not as important because you're just trying to find the time to read what you want to read, and have less patience for the books you think you should read. You're not in school anymore so the only "should" when it comes to reading lists is self-imposed, and at 30 you've got enough other "shoulds" in your life that the last thing you want is to find them on your reading list.

The self-imposed discipline to develop the mind of an intellectual or whatever it is that motivates a young reader of literature isn't there with the same intensity in the mind of a 30-year-old. Your maturity allows you to read for simple pleasure, and you feel less guilty abandoning your earlier dreams of brilliance or intellectual supremacy because you've seen too many struggling academics, pathetic wannabe writers and socially awkward geniuses who've read more than you ever will to either want to or even be able to keep up with them. You still read serious literature but if it doesn't say anything to you or have any relevance to your life you're less likely to force yourself to finish it and less afraid to dismiss it as shit.