The Bookworm’s Curse

by

Andi Miller

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re the victim of the English Major curse.” Those were the words spoken to me by a good friend after I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in English in 2003. While I anxiously awaited graduation, I wasn’t excited for the impending full-time employment, the money I planned to make, or the freedom to move about the country as I pleased. No, quite simply, I was really excited because I could now read whatever I wanted after a long stretch of imposed book choices. I enjoyed a great deal of the literature I read in college, but unbridled choice was like the pot of gold at the end of an emotionally and intellectually draining rainbow.

Everything played out as planned except for one major detail. I rarely read after I graduated. I moved halfway across the country from Texas to North Carolina, I secured a job teaching literature to tenth graders in a local high school, and I had a tendency to pet my books a great deal, but the reading part was trickier. While I generally read an average of 50-60 books per year under normal circumstances, I think I read a miserable total of 24 in 2003. Alas, it was true; the curse of the newly graduated English major came to pass and sat on my slumped shoulders for a full year. That which I wanted most was just out of my reach. My fun reading was ruined by the exhaustion of starting a new life and the realization that I had unlimited reading choices—so many that it became overwhelming.

Today is almost exactly five years after the fact. I have another degree under my belt, I skipped out on that miserable high school teaching gig a long time ago, and I have a brand new set of cherry wood bookcases that are absolutely to die for. And I’m in another slump.

It’s probably inevitable that every reader experiences the slump from time to time. We’re not machines, after all. However, for me personally, a reading slump never loses the glaze of utter frustration. I tend to have flashbacks to the Dark Year, those days when I would pick up a book, read ten pages, and promptly return it to the shelf. I might wander through a bookstore, lustily gazing at titles and inspecting covers, and take a tasty new book home only to look at it from across the room in a haze of anxiety and disappointment. Now, in the darkest corners of the night, when I can’t sleep and can’t find anything else to do other than wish for sleep, I long to escape into a book even though I have the attention span of a goldfish.

While I’m thankfully past the English Major curse, I suffer from the general and far-reaching Bookworm’s Curse. When stress is high, patience is running low, and I can’t seem to keep my head above the surface in a sea of student papers I lose my reading nerve. The 200 or so unread books in my office gaze out at me from their uniform rows, mocking me. They stick out their tongues, waggle their eyebrows lasciviously, and ultimately scoff, turn their backs, and ridicule me in silence.

I JUST WANT TO READ!

But I can’t. Because I’m cursed. All I can do is turn out the light or the DVD player, or escape into a rousing game of SIMS 2 until the stress level subsides and I can return to my one true love with undivided attention and admiration.

Thank God next week is Spring Break. Wish me luck.


Andi is a recovering university academic employed by the North Carolina community college system as an English instructor. While she decided to forego a Ph.D. and career as a professor, she fills in all the free time her current position affords her with editing literary publications, reviewing, freelancing, and blogging. Her work can be found in the journal, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), and Altar Magazine as well as online in various venues such as PopMatters.com. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and writes fiction. Her turn-ons include new books and gelato, while her turn-offs are reality television and washing dishes. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it