I've got Reader's Block! by Kathleen Jones

I've always been a massive Bookworm, gobbling up print at a reckless pace, impatient to start the next book before I finish the last.  I buy books like some women buy clothes - addictively!  There are books all over the house, in piles on the stairs, on my bedside table, in the loo, on the landing, spilling over the bookshelves in the sitting room, occupying every single horizontal space in my office.  The trouble is, I'm not reading any of them.

For the first time in my life I'm finding it a struggle to pick up a book, let alone open it.

As an author, of course, this is disastrous.  If I can't read other people's, what chance of them reading mine? But there's nothing I can do about it - my brain is just absolutely chock full of WORDS and refusing to admit any more.  I have become 'text averse'.  Fortunately, trawling the internet, it seems to be an affliction that is more common than I'd thought. I came upon this:

It's even the subject of a novel by David Markson (which, in my present state, I'm unlikely to read).

It's like suddenly becoming allergic to sex (one of life's other great pleasures) - surrounded by hunky men and not fancying any of them!  Are there book therapists as well as sex therapists out there? Does the cure (see Pamela Stephenson) lie in approaching the object of (un) desire slowly? Touching it, sniffing it (oh how I love the smell of books), opening the cover gently before putting it down again? Allowing yourself not to read? It's all in the mind, of course.

Sadly, I think I'm just exhausted.  It's been a thoroughly stressful year after the winter floods. And I've been working as a Lector, running a Reading Group for the Royal Literary Fund, which has meant that I've had to read voraciously to find stories and poems for my readers every week. The only other time I can remember having a very mild case of Reader's Block was when I was studying for a literature degree and finishing the research for my first biography at the same time. Too much enforced reading and too little just for pleasure. One of the members of my reading group has admitted that she became unable to read for fun after an academic course. Reading critically changed the way she read, cancelling out the imaginative journey.

I've also been doing quite a bit of reviewing and that has been an additional pressure. So I've now stopped reviewing.  August is going to be a bookless month - I need a rest and, hopefully, come September I will feel the urge to turn on my Kindle, or open the covers of one of the books on my bedside table.

 Anyone got any suggestions for a cure?

Bookworm - aged 3

Kathleen Jones writes poetry, biography and fiction for both mainstream and indie publishing.  You can find her at www.kathleenjones.co.uk 

She blogs at 'A Writer's Life'

On Twitter incognito at @kathyferber

On Facebook here -

Her latest book is an account of the First Nation people of the northwest coast of Canada and Alaska, called 'Travelling to the Edge of the World'. 

"...It enthralled me from beginning to end ... I felt that I journeyed with the author on every step of her remarkable undertaking and found, like her, I did not want to return from the Haida, from their lands and the experience that she writes about so beautifully. It touched me in so many ways: the instincts of the nomad, the desire for solitude, the landscape as a beating heart of a nation, of us all, our lack of care of the land, the destruction, the horrors of colonialism, the joy of art, the wonders of the ocean... Kathleen Jones reflect on so many of the questions we should be asking about our planet and how we live in it."  Avril Joy - Costa award-winning novelist.