I am going through a really awful transition period in my life. I have pretty much stopped reading because my nervous system is so activated I cannot concentrate.
I am trying to step away from the tv/video games because I know it’s making everything worse, so I’ve picked up crochet as a hobby, and I’m enjoying it. But I don’t want the tv on while I do it, I’d rather listen to an audiobook.
The problem is that while I’m in this transitional period I can’t seem to enjoy the books I normally would. I normally like anything from historical fiction to sci-fi to horror, but I am so overwhelmed and my cptsd is so often triggered as of late that I need a story that is easy to listen to, interesting, but isnt too overwhelming. For example I love horror but it’s giving me palpitations now lol. I am so overwhelmed that high fantasy is confusing and I just get lost.
I have tried A Psalm for the Wild Built and it’s nice and cute but it didn’t hold my attention.
Am I sol? I have tried just listening to music (classical) which I like, but I need something more. I miss reading!
Thank you if you can think of anything
by extranervous
4 Comments
A book that I found perfect in a transitional phase I went through recently was “Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop”. It’s a cozy book.
Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich
Sorry it is not what you asked, but having gone through a similar phase, the only thing that both kept my mind off things and also did not require any effort was to watch Friends for the 100th time. I was not in a place to absorb anything new, definitely not a book at the time. Friends is familiar, I know it will not be triggering and it calms my racing mind. Would you try maybe like reading an old book from your childhood that you know you like or maybe listening to an audiobook version of something light and something you have read and enjoyed before?
When my brain is doing this, I like what I call Trivia Night Nonfiction where you just get a lot of interesting facts on a topic but none of those facts is more than 5ish minutes of book-time so you don’t have to maintain concentration.
Some of my favorites: all of Mary Roach’s books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, “Salt, A World History” (Kurlansky’s other books are good too, I just saw he has one on Paper I haven’t read yet). Bill Bryson’s “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” and “One Summer: America, 1927”.
I also sometimes turn to biographies or memoirs. I sat here struggling trying to remember the book I listened to last that really got me, but actually it was a podcast series: [The Spy Who](https://wondery.com/shows/the-spy-who/). Each season is 5 episodes, they’re really well-written and performed, and I love spy stuff so I was totally sucked in to most of the seasons.