When One Bad Book Breaks Everything: On Reading Slumps & Starting Over

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(Or: How Leather & Lark temporarily destroyed my will to read)

There’s a particular kind of reading misery that doesn’t get talked about enough, not the slump that creeps in slowly, not the one born from burnout or busyness, but the one that hits you fast and hard because a book you genuinely tried to like just… didn’t work. At all.

And now you’re sitting there, surrounded by your beautiful TBR, and nothing sounds appealing because your reading brain is a little bruised.

That’s exactly where I am right now, and I’m blaming Leather & Lark entirely.

I don’t want to spend this post tearing that book apart, that review can be found here, but I will say that the experience of finishing something and feeling actively worse for having read it is its own specific kind of letdown. 

Especially when you went in with real hope. I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. 

And when it still didn’t land, I closed the cover and felt that familiar reading-slump fog start to roll in.

Why One Bad Book Can Derail Everything

I think reading slumps after a disappointing book hit differently than other kinds. 

When you burn out, you at least know you loved the books that got you there. But when a book actively lets you down, it leaves this residual skepticism, a little voice that whispers, what if the next one disappoints me too?

Suddenly the TBR pile feels less like a stack of possibilities and more like a stack of potential let-downs. 

The excitement that usually propels you toward your next read gets replaced by a kind of low-grade wariness. 

You pick up a book, read the first page, put it back down. Repeat. Sound familiar?

Reading is emotional work, even when we don’t think of it that way. We invest time, attention, and genuine feeling into stories. 

When a book doesn’t give that back, it makes sense that we’d need a moment to recover before we’re ready to invest again.

What I’m Doing to Reset

I’ve been in enough reading slumps to know that forcing myself through a book I’m not feeling is the fastest way to make the slump worse. 

So instead, I’m giving myself permission to be a non-reader for a little while. Not forever, just long enough for the fog to lift.

In the meantime, I’m leaning on a few things that have pulled me out before. 

Short books are usually my first move, something I can finish in a sitting or two. Something that reminds me that reading can be fun and fast, and rewarding. 

I’ve also been considering a comfort reread, returning to a world I already know I love, where there’s no risk of disappointment because I already know how the story ends.

I’ve also found that sometimes the best reset isn’t reading at all, it’s just being around books. 

Reorganizing my shelves. Looking at my TBR and remembering why I bought each one. Letting the anticipation rebuild naturally rather than forcing it.

The Slump Isn’t the End of the Story

Here’s what I have to keep reminding myself: every slump ends. 

I’ve come out of every single one of them, always with a book that cracked things back open. Sometimes a five-star read, sometimes just a perfectly fine three-star that reminded me that reading is supposed to be enjoyable, not a test of endurance.

The slump is part of the reading life. It doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving books. It just means I need a minute.

And in the meantime, I have a very long list of books I’ve been meaning to get to, which, honestly, feels like exactly the right thing to daydream about right now. (More on that very soon.)

Have you ever had a single book send you into a reading slump? What pulled you out? I’d love to know – drop it in the comments below.