A Librarian’s Guide to Loving Books
According to the Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) via Book Riot, Nikki DeMarco spent years thinking she wasn’t a “real reader.” Although books were always central to her life—collecting them, carrying them, reading them late at night—her reading methods did not align with society’s accepted pattern. She would start a book, read a few chapters, then suddenly pick up another one. Sometimes she read several books simultaneously and forgot the details of each. Some nights she would read hundreds of pages in a state of intense focus, only to fall into a complete reading slump for weeks.
DeMarco writes that this fluctuating pattern caused her to feel like a failure because she had been taught since childhood that a “good reader” is someone who reads quietly and continuously, from start to finish, without interruption or skipping any pages. Later, when she became a teacher, she saw the same pattern in schools: reading logs and tests were meant to encourage a love for books, but many children were crushed by these standards. In this system, reading became “work” and “competition” instead of pleasure.
When DeMarco became a librarian, she saw the same feelings of shame and doubt in her patrons. Students apologized, saying they only read manga; teenagers said listening to audiobooks was “cheating”; or adults confessed with embarrassment that they constantly reread romance novels. At this point, she made an important discovery: the problem isn’t the readers, but the rules that assume a specific type of mind is the “standard.”
DeMarco writes: “The model we call proper reading is actually a neurotypical reading; reading for a brain that can focus for hours, has temporal regulation, and is inclined towards specific genres. This model leaves no room for mind-wandering, sensory fatigue, or soothing repetition. For those living with depression, anxiety, or the need to review a sentence multiple times, this pattern effectively equates to exclusion.”
In the process of self-discovery and receiving neurodivergent diagnoses, DeMarco decided to abandon this pattern. She allowed herself to drop books unfinished, to consider audiobooks a form of “reading with another key,” and to interpret rereading not as a waste of time but as self-care. According to her, “When I let go of the old standards, my reading life expanded. I fell in love with books again—not as a duty, but as companions I could return to on my own time and in my own way.”
DeMarco now transfers this approach to her students in her library. To anyone who says, “I’m not really a book person,” she responds: “You are already a reader.” Reading manga, listening to audiobooks, flipping through picture books, or slowly reading a fantasy novel over several months—all of these are real and valuable forms of reading.
She concludes: “Reading is not about discipline or performance. It doesn’t matter how many books you have finished or how much you know about literary awards. Reading is about connection. When you let go of neurotypical rules, you can build a relationship with books that is enjoyable, alive, and nonjudgmental.”
