Choosing the Better Ending

What changed when I stopped forcing my reading life

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

» It’s been a very revealing ten seconds, Harold.

This isn’t a post about how many books I read last year.

This is a post about how and why my relationship with books finally settled, quietly and gradually, after a long season of asking myself hard questions about my reading life.

If you’ve been here for a while, you already know that this hasn’t been a straight-line journey. Over the past year or two, I’ve written my way through burnout, frustration, over-planning, and the strange sadness of realizing that something I love had started to feel harder than it should. I’ve talked about collapsing an overgrown TBR, about my [then] uneasy relationship with galleys, about the push-and-pull between structure and freedom. About wanting my reading life to feel like mine again.

At the time, none of those pieces felt like answers. They were more like street lamps — small attempts to light up the block where I was standing, even when I couldn’t yet see the road ahead.

What I didn’t know then was that I was already in the middle of a shift.

On paper, my reading life looked normal. Productive, even. I was posting and sharing consistently, involved, keeping up. But beneath that, something was sliding out of alignment. Reading had started to feel off-center. Heavier. Less like a place I could climb inside to reset and more like something adjacent to my life — a thing I was managing rather than inhabiting.

The misalignment wasn’t a dramatic single thing, but a low-level resistance I kept trying to push through, convinced that if I planned a little better, organized a little smarter, or committed a little harder, the joy would click back into place.

It didn’t.

Somewhere along the way, tools I’d created to support my reading started creating pressure instead. Planning ahead became expectation. Prepping for upcoming books turned into commitment.

And I’ve learned this about myself over and over again:
I don’t like being told what to read — even when I’m the one doing the telling.

That friction showed up in subtle ways. I found myself thinking too far ahead, mentally slotting books into future versions of myself who might feel differently than I did in the moment. I’d get excited and prepare for what was coming next, only to feel boxed in by my own enthusiasm. What started as possibility hardened into obligation.

The more I planned, the more resistance I felt.

What finally helped wasn’t me trying to optimize my way out of it. It was slowing down enough to notice where the discomfort was living and sit with it. I had to actually acknowledge that something I loved had gotten off-kilter — and that no amount of discipline was going to right it.

The real movement came when I stopped asking, What should I read next? and started asking, What actually fits right now?

That question changed everything. It removed the “should.”

I began trusting my gut again — about timing, about format, about whether something deserved more of my attention or less. I gave myself real permission to let go early, including with books I once would’ve forced myself to finish out of obligation (ahem ... galleys). Not because they were bad, but because they weren’t right at the time. Or they just weren’t right for me.

That trust didn’t just make reading easier. It made it feel expansive and inviting again.

By the end of the year, reading felt like a part of me once more. Not something adjacent, but joyful in a way that felt familiar.

Looking back on 2025, the most surprising thing wasn’t what I read or how much. It was what the patterns revealed once I stopped treating them like an obstacle. The problem wasn’t my taste, but the pressure I had engineered around it.

That understanding reframed everything. Reading didn’t need stricter rules. It needed more leg room. More openness. More space for curiosity to lead from the front of the line instead of obligation.

As I move into this new year, what I want most isn’t a better plan. It’s protection — for the things that made reading feel alive again. Spontaneity. Serendipity. The freedom to change my mind midway through anything.

That’s actually where the control lives — the control I’d been chasing in all the wrong places. In that openness, I found my way back to the willingness to let something unexpected find me.

For 2026, the goal isn’t to plan better. It’s to stay open.

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When does your reading life feel most open, and how does planning support that … or close it off?

Happy reading!

—C.