📖 Your Reading Habits Might Be Rarer Than You Think

Hello, lovely reader 

Somewhere along the way, reading got a rulebook nobody remembers agreeing to. Finish what you start. One book at a time. Physical books "count" more than audiobooks. Rereading is a waste of a perfectly good TBR slot. If you've ever felt a flicker of guilt over how you read rather than what you read, this one's for you.

🔁 The Rereaders

Some readers have a small, sacred rotation of books they return to every year, sometimes every season. It's not indecision — it's comfort. A familiar story is a familiar friend, and there's nothing lesser about choosing to spend time with characters who already feel like home. If your shelf has a few books with cracked spines and soft, well-loved pages, you're not "behind" on new releases. You're just loyal.

🎧 The Audiobook Listeners

There's a persistent myth that audiobooks are somehow a shortcut, a lesser form of reading. They're not. Listening to a story is still absorbing a story — through a different door, that's all. Whether it's during a commute, a workout, or the fifteen minutes before sleep, if a book made its way into your mind, it counts. Full stop.

🌗 The Mood Readers

Not everyone reads in a straight line. Some readers have four books going at once — one for the bath, one for the bus, one for late-night chapters, one that's been "in progress" for three months and isn't going anywhere. This isn't a lack of commitment. It's reading in a way that matches real life, which rarely moves in a straight line either.

🚪 The DNF-ers

Putting a book down partway through used to feel like failure. Increasingly, readers are treating it as self-respect instead. Life is short, TBRs are long, and not every book is meant to be finished by you, right now. A DNF isn't a loss — it's just information about what you actually want to be reading.

🐌 The Slow Readers

Not every reader measures a good year in triple digits. Some people read four books a year and remember every single one in detail — the exact chair they were sitting in, the weather outside, who they were when they read it. Slow reading isn't the opposite of loving books. Sometimes it's the deepest form of it.

Whichever version of "reader" you are this week — rereader, mood reader, slow reader, all of the above depending on the day — there's no wrong way to do this. If anything unites this whole community, it's not how fast we read or how many formats we use. It's that we all keep coming back to books, again and again, in whatever shape fits our lives right now.

If your current reading setup could use a little more comfort — whatever your habits look like — our Cosy Book Lover Shirt collection is built for readers who read on their own terms.

With love, The Bean Workshop 🫘