I am a lifelong jock, married to a bookworm. Early on, my husband told me that exercise for him was more than uncomfortable—it was miserable.

“You just haven’t found the right sport yet,” I said.

He had been trying to like running for years, but he never got the ever promised “runner’s high” with the endorphins or good energy that typically follows. It wasn’t until I introduced him to cycling and skiing that he really found true athletic hobbies he enjoyed without external reinforcement.

On my end of things, I had felt the same about his one true love: reading. Reading came to me only in short spurts followed by long periods (years) of neglect. For nearly a decade, my tactic when it came to book selection was to go for popular books with a very high rating on Goodreads. That way, I thought, I’ll be more likely to finish the book, avoiding the abandoned-book shame spiral, and I’d be more likely to hit my annual goals for number of books read. This led me to a lot of celebrity book club novels and summer best sellers.

This year, in the midst of a social media detox, it dawned on me after all these years of begrudgingly reading half-forced books, that I needed to heed my own advice. I needed to “find the right sport” or, genre.

I began to truly assess what books I was genuinely interested in based on which books really stuck with me. (What a concept!) And it became clear that I had wasted years reading books that bore me to death simply because everyone else liked them.

Turns out, I love nonfiction. I don’t want to be entertained. I don’t want to escape to another world. I don’t want to imagine characters who don’t exist.

I want to learn new things. I want to better understand this weird world I live in. I want to read poetry by someone whose life I can research on the internet. I want to hear crazy but true stories of survival, love, and war.

I always thought of nonfiction books as the nerdiest books, but I’ve finally “found my sport.”

What am I reading now? Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

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