Reading Too Much

Grief

After a stressful day, I'm likely to be found on the internet.



But after an especially stressful day, I turn to books. Novels, usually. It's not strictly for escapist reasons, though I may choose a genre book, but whatever media I find, I can't not think about it. But it does get my mental track onto something a little healthier than mentally damning the Ford 350 trying to swipe me off the road because G-d forbid he wait the extra 1.2 seconds for me to get by.



Instead I can quibble with someone I'll never meet about their choice to have only one significant female character in an 950-page novel, even though a good half of the action supposedly takes place in a world with equal representation.



Why are there so many people who think that's not a problem?



See, with reading, I can get my gander up over something both socially relevant *and* remarkably trivial. But what's been considered 'stressful' in my life is generally from a complete lack of anything intellectually challenging or a distressing emotional event. Critiquing literature is good for the former, not so much the latter, which is why I don't do it. In the second case I instead I read to not think, maybe something I've read before, maybe something just compelling, so I don't think about it.



Perhaps avoidance is a different kind of stress. But it's not something I like to handle. Reading to forget doesn't count as any kind of relaxing, because then it just hits you later.