For the past few years, I’ve been reading nonfiction like crazy, no matter the genres, from autobiographies, history, to science. From bestsellers to obscure titles. Everything. If a book sparked my curiosity, I’d dive right in.

But slowly, the burnout crept in.

At first, it was subtle. Then the world began to feel heavier: authoritarianism rising in multiple countries, wars breaking out, economic crises looming like storm clouds. Each nonfiction book I picked up, while informative, started to feel like another weight pressing down on me. Instead of clarity, I felt anxious. Instead of comfort, I was overwhelmed. I’ve mentioned this in the past blog posts (read: The Emotional Cost of Being a Reader) where I became more sensitive to what I was reading. Reading, something I once loved, turned into a mentally exhausting task.

Still, I didn’t want to fall into a reading slump. Not just because of the burnout, but because I knew how dangerous it felt to disconnect from reading altogether in a world this noisy. Social media. News. Distractions that rot the brain if you let them take over.

To ease the burnout without letting go of my reading routine, I turned to poetry. That small shift made a huge difference. (I wrote more about it in my post How Poetry Helped My Burnout and Anxiety.) Poems offered me a kind of gentle truth-telling, a slower rhythm that gave me room to breathe.

But what surprised me even more was the way classic fiction slowly entered my life.

Thanks to the mysterious ways of the Bookstagram algorithm, I started seeing quotes from classic novels pop up on my feed. Some of them captured the rage I felt about today’s world but instead of making me spiral, they soothed me. They named what I felt, but with a kind of grace and distance that didn’t set off my anxiety. (Though, fair warning: don’t trust every quote you see on Bookstagram. I’ve since learned that not all of them are accurate or even from the author they’re attributed to.)

Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Curious, I started borrowing classic novels from my local library. And that’s when something shifted. I found that classic fiction tells the raw truth about what it means to be human but it does so with poetry, with story, with beauty. It touched the same nerve nonfiction did, but in a softer, more enduring way. The struggles described in stories written decades, even centuries ago, still mirror what we’re living through now. It made me feel oddly comforted, like I wasn’t alone in this moment of history. Others have been through this. Others have felt this ache.

At the same time, it left me a little heartbroken. How little we seem to have changed. How, despite all our progress, we’re still wrestling with the same crises of humanity.

But I keep reading. And with each page, I find a little more peace. A little more connection. A little more love for fiction I never thought I’d enjoy.