There are books I’ve owned for years that I genuinely intend to read. They sit on the shelf looking patient and slightly accusatory. I pick them up sometimes, read the first page, put them down. Not because they’re bad — I don’t know if they’re bad, I’ve never gotten far enough to find out. They’re just not right yet. The mood for them hasn’t arrived and I can’t manufacture it and I’ve stopped trying.
The mood is specific and non-negotiable. There’s a mood for long quiet novels and a different mood for something that moves fast and doesn’t ask much of you. There’s a mood for essays, which requires you to be in a state of mild restlessness that wants to be shaped into something. There’s a mood for rereading — which is its own category, which requires you to want the comfort of already knowing, which usually shows up during the harder stretches of a year without announcing itself as such.
The best reading experiences are the ones where the book and the mood arrive at the same time by accident. You weren’t planning to read that particular book, you just picked it up because it was there, and it turned out to be exactly what some part of you needed without knowing it. Those books change you a little. Not because they’re better than other books but because they found you at the right moment, which is as much about you as it is about them.
The worst is being in a reading mood but not the mood for anything you own. You cycle through the shelves like a person standing in front of an open fridge — something is in there, technically, something should work — but nothing is right and eventually you close the fridge and watch TV instead. The mood expires unused. The books wait.
I have a book on my nightstand I’ve been meaning to finish for four months. The bookmark is on page 180. I was really into it and then something shifted and now I can’t get back in. I’ll get back in. The mood will come back around. These things move in cycles and you can’t rush them and in the meantime the book just sits there, holding my place, waiting for me to return to the person who was reading it.