Priya told me about a year into us working together that she used to read constantly as a kid and just sort of stopped somewhere in her twenties, the way people do, not a decision exactly, just other things filling the space until reading wasn’t a habit anymore, just a thing she used to be. She’d tried a few times to get back into it and given up a chapter or two in, which she seemed a little embarrassed about admitting, like it reflected something about her attention span rather than just being a normal thing that happens to a lot of people.

I lent her Children of Time mostly because I’d just finished it and was still thinking about it, not with any real plan behind the recommendation. She texted me at chapter four saying she was rooting for spiders, actual spiders, more than she was rooting for the human characters, and I knew something had actually clicked because that’s exactly the response I’d had myself. She finished it in under two weeks, which for someone who told me she hadn’t finished a book in years felt like a real event, and she showed up to game night that Thursday asking if I had anything else like it.

She’s read six books since, which isn’t a huge number in the scheme of things but is enormous relative to where she started, and I’ve been genuinely careful about what I hand her next, not wanting to overcorrect with something too dense too fast and undo the momentum. I don’t think I did anything clever here, I think I just handed her the right book at the right moment more by luck than design. But I’ve been paying closer attention since to what I recommend to people who say they used to read and don’t anymore, because apparently the right one at the right time actually can undo years of a habit quietly falling away.

What surprised me most was how it changed our actual friendship at the clinic, not just game night. We’d talk over lunch about spider civilizations while a client waited up front, or she’d catch me between appointments to tell me she’d stayed up too late finishing a section she meant to stop at an hour earlier. She started asking to borrow the reading log itself at one point, wanting to see what I’d rated things and when, and I said no almost immediately, some instinct that the log is mine in a way the books aren’t, and then felt a little bad about it after. I lent her a couple of the actual paperbacks instead, the ones with my notes in the margins, which felt like a fair compromise even if it wasn’t really what she’d asked for.

She went through a stretch after Children of Time where she picked things almost entirely on my say so, which worried me a little, I didn’t want her reading habit to depend on me being the one steering it forever. The sixth book she picked herself, off the shelf at the used bookstore without asking me first, something I hadn’t even read yet, and she brought it to game night practically holding it like proof of something. I think that was the actual moment it stuck for good, not the spiders, this one, the first time the choosing was entirely hers. She still asks what I’m reading most weeks. I’ve just started asking her back first.