Every time someone asks me if I like to read books, I reply:

I do, but it depends🤔. Sometimes I get excited and read dozens a year, but I can also have years go by without reading a single one¹

Curiously, all the times my reading interest was rekindled it was due to experimenting a different genre or medium, for example:

1. In 2010, I fell in love with historical novels with the excellent “Wolf of the Plains” by Conn Iggulden;
2. As for 2015, I moved to science fiction with “The Martian” by Andy Weir;
3. In 2018 I gave biographies a shot through “You’re Never Weird on the Internet” by Felicia Day²;
4. Finally, in 2022 I got to “adult comics”, after paying a visit to FIQ³.

I love saying the expression “adult comics”, because the first thing that many people will think about is that I’m reading something with pornographic content 🔞⁴ and very few will actually consider that it might be a story with serious, even factual, content with the drawings as a medium.

Reading one of those⁵, I found out about the state of Rojava, to the north of Syria, where citizens live in a decentralized government in which women have a leading role that makes many modern states envious. In another, a memoir of a soldier that started crossdressing to flee from the war and, by doing so, rediscovered their identity⁶.

In 2024 one of my goals is to read more and try to stabilize my cycles of ups and downs in reading, because I miss the stimuli it brings me, such as the one to write⁷. I still don’t know whether it will be a year to revisit previously known genres, or to challenge myself and keep exploring, like reading a horror story. What I do know is that I’m excited and already at the fourth book.

What about you, are you going to try adult comics or choose the guilty pleasure of a young adult? I’d love to chat more about it, in case you take one my recommendations or if you have a suggestion to me. Happy reading!

PS: The image of this post was generated using artificial intelligence, through a request I made to my friend Thamara Andrade, and had some edits of my own. The prompt used was: “a book with an explicit cover where all the explicit parts are hidden by censored tags”.