Bibi van der Zee has a problem: She thinks perhaps she reads too much. As she puts it in a Guardian essay:

…. if you are a compulsive reader like me, who reads walking down the road, and while she’s making her children’s dinner, and on the loo and in the bath and in bed and on the bus, and at every other possible second of the day, and if what you’re reading is mostly . . . well . . . pulp, then sometimes you end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round. Sure, there’s a smattering of literature and high art-type stuff in there, but mostly it is whatever I have fished off the shelf at my nearest Oxfam that morning — detective stories, romances, horror, sci fi . . . any kind of fiction that I can gulp down in large enough, quick enough bites.

So, she decides to try something radical: Giving up reading for a week.

It doesn’t work so well:

By Thursday, my early glow has worn off …. I am incredibly tetchy and snappy; more than usual? Impossible to know (everyone’s too scared to tell me), but Friday is the same and even a little worse and I can’t find any way to relax, to switch off and get away from the things that you list in your head at 11.30pm at night. … I slump down on to the sofa for a half hour that would usually involve a novel, a cuppa, and maybe a biscuit. Instead, after staring at the wall for a bit, I fetch my laptop and do some more work. Life feels deeply, wintrily joyless. It feels wall-to-wall grey.

Books, I realise, have been one of my longest, truest friends. When I’m anxious, sad, angry, in need of comfort, a book is often the first place I will go …. And now I have just cast them aside, as if all my flaws are their fault, and not the other way round.

The day that the ban is lifted, I wait until the children have gone to bed, and then pick up the novel I was halfway through when the axe fell, pour a glass of wine and settle down with it, a bit worried that somehow (like the first puff of a fag when you’ve given up smoking for a while) it won’t be as good as before, that somehow I will have spoilt it.

But there’s no need to worry. Immediately, it is as if the wardrobe doors to Narnia have been thrown open again and thousands of other technicolour lives have tumbled straight back out from that eighth dimension inside my head. Day-to-day life just fades out, I stop worrying, stop twitching and just forget who or where I am for a gorgeous hour. I have still not got around to hanging those pictures in the bathroom. But reader, I am never giving up books again.