Why Are We Drawn To Certain Books But Not Others?

We're all familiar with the feeling of a reading slump. Books that used to enchant us have lost their spark. Stories that pulled us through hundreds of pages start to put us to sleep. We find ourselves gliding our eyes across the words secretly wishing that the book would soon come to an end. When this happens, we find ourselves caught in the dilemma of the reading slump: should we keep reading or do something else?

Generally speaking, a reading slump stems from the tension between what we think we want to read and what we actually want to read. Sometimes the two worlds align. We're enjoying a book we think we'd enjoy. But sometimes they don't and we find ourselves straining against our instincts. As Robert Escarpit wrote, the "cultured man" who knows Racine will never be so foolhardy as to admit that what he really loves is Tintin (cited in Felski 53)1. We find it hard to swallow our pride and ditch a book we don't enjoy because we don't want to admit that we've misjudged our own taste.

This toil has a pretty obvious solution: we need to remain open and adjust our reading habits to what we're attuned to. In other words, we need to read the right book at the right time to fully enjoy it. But to achieve this, we have to understand how attunement works.