What happened?

I was randomly reading some unfinished stories that I had written years ago and they're really not half-bad. I mean, they're not amazingly great but they're certainly better than anything I've written recently.

One of the things I've been having problems with is flow. I find my recent writings to sound forced and... trite. Some of my old pieces at least flowed and for the most part didn't sound clumsy. The descriptions were decently vivid, and the use of vocabulary was varied enough that it didn't sound like I was using the same words over and over again. Most importantly, they had the potential to draw the reader into the story.

I suspect that the main reason that I have literary constipation is that I don't read regularly anymore. I can't transfer my thoughts convincingly onto paper/screen simply because I don't know how to anymore. My vocabulary is pretty much shot, and it shows in my more recent poems as well.

Strangely enough, even though I usually attribute my decrease in reading to lack of time, I actually blame my Form 3 English teacher. She told us that whenever we come across a word in a book that we didn't know the meaning of, we should write it down and look it up. That totally killed reading for me. I got so caught up in understanding the literal meaning of every single word (as opposed to assuming meaning through context or just plain skipping over it) that my escape into the story was always interrupted by the need to write unknown words down.
Similarly, I find myself reading lines or paragraphs over and over again just to make sure that I actually understand what the author is trying to say, as opposed to just reading and letting the story permeate without effort.

I'm definitely going to try to get back into the reading thing because I miss getting lost in a book, and I miss being able to write effortlessly. Of course, things are always easier said than done.