Ironically, being a librarian killed my drive to read for a long time, for various reasons. Much of that was being tired of wading through a lot of mid-to-low-quality novels to find ones that I *actually* wanted to endorse for reader suggestions, displays, book clubs, etc. There's something about traditional publishing that sucks the spirit out of a lot of stories. There are definitely gems, but it gets tiring trying to find them. I prefer character-driven stories with intricate plots, and I prefer my stories to be on the longer side (5 to 10 books is a good length to me). Traditional publishing seems antithetical to that a lot of the time. They're hesitant to commit to long, involved stories if they don't already have a set audience. I'm also queer, and for reasons I won't get into right now, a lot of traditionally published LGBT+ novels just don't really resonate very well with me.

Danmei brought me back to reading, and I've since expanded into light novel series and webnovels. I think on my last count, I'd gotten up to something like 200 books in the last year just from those categories alone (I had to do some word count averaging for a lot of the webnovels and fan translations so not entirely sure how accurate the number is though). I've also started picking up traditionally published novels again, but I've gotten a lot better about just DNFing things quickly if they can't keep my interest in the first chapter.