Tired of reading but still want to call yourself a reader because you’ve cultivated an entire identity around your junior high years of consuming novels when you were friendless and constantly ignored? Then this is for you! These are fun reading activities that don’t actually involve reading, so you can remain assured in your identity as a reader while foregoing any cognitive dissonance you might experience from not actually reading.
Finding A Quote In A Book And Making It Your Entire Personality
Don’t want to actually read? Just want to skim a book like you probably skimmed all the readings you had to do in high school? Then this is the activity for you!
Simply pick a book, skim it, choose a quote at random, and apply it to every facet of your life. How about this: grab the nearest book, flip to page 69, and choose the first sentence (or sentences if they go together) of the first paragraph. That’s your new life motto.
Here’s mine:
I was separated from all such things. I had no money, no liberty, no emancipation.
Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of The Golden Pavilion, 69
Sounds like a sexy and fun way to live my life. Truly a lifestyle to aspire to.
Making Bookmarks
Enjoy making bookmarks for your growing TBR pile that you will never finish. Spend hours customizing the bookmakers you may never end up using because you are too busy making bookmarks instead of reading.
Alternatively, you could also simply buy more books, add to your TBR pile, make more bookmarks for those books, never read anything, and continue the cycle. This way, you’ll never be free from the intense urge to procrastinate doing something you love (reading) by doing something you absolutely-don’t-love (making bookmarks).
Critiquing Book Art (Angrily)
There are lots of book art that people like to make, and it’s an enjoyable experience! That is . . . until you’ve realized they’ve cut the pages and cover to make an aesthetically pleasing letter or some nonsense like that.
Isn’t that practically sacrilege?!? Why would you do that to a perfectly good book! Why are you folding the pages and cutting them up and mutilating them??! To be trendy?
If you indulge in book art like this, then you probably also enjoy kicking puppies in your free time. No person who cuts up or damages a book is a trust-worthy human being.
The sole exception, of course, is Fahrenheit 451, and this exception only applies if you are burning it. Once again, burning a book for any reason is rather dubious and should invoke a thorough investigation on your character, but since the subject matter practically deals with book burning, I will begrudgingly allow it.
. . . On second thought, no I don’t, why are people going around burning books—
Critiquing Book Art (Despairingly)
I’m unsure what the stages of grief are, but I’m assuming that despair is somewhere in there. Anyway, the situation is this: you’re finally done being angry at humanity for book burning and page folding and cover cutting and have now fallen into complete despair. This should not be too difficult, considering you read books and thus are very close to having an emotional breakdown most days of the week already, so instead of yelling at the (morally!) bad book art, you just cry.
Why, you sob, why do they have to fold the pages?
Because, I respond solemnly, because Xunzi was right and we are evil, evil beings. Don’t fold the pages of a book for book art or I’ll fold you in half backward.
Conclusion
Thus, here are your reading activities that don’t actually involve (much) reading. Your welcome, I have saved you from boredom, no need to applaud me, I can feel your gratitude through the screen.
If you liked this, check out Fun Writing Activities To Do.
What other things do you do when you’re not reading?