Not Me Again, Not Reading
This past summer I read a collection of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns in The Believer from 2005, a fun little paperback with the intially confusing title, Housekeeping vs The Dirt. The concept of the column (which began in 2003 and is still going — Housekeeping is the second of at least five collections of these columns) was that he was in a rut in his reading life and was going to try to pick up books he wouldn’t usually pick up and see where it led him. The result is a monthly roundup of all the books he read that month (accompanied by a list of all the books he bought). The reader gets short reactions to new and old books in a wide range of genres and a pleasant ride on the train of Hornby’s discursive style and absurd humor, which is already plenty, but the columns also offer a lot of unpretentious and pragmatic thinking about books, amounting to a loose, everyman’s philosophy of reading scattered across the book in the form of epigrammatic comments, such as:
"We often read books that we think we ought to read, or that we think we ought to have read, or that other people think we should read."
And:
"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good."
And:
"If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity - and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured - then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits."
I don’t read a lot for leisure, but it was the first book I’d read in a while that I’d loved without reserve. I rarely say this: the book was FUN. And it made me want to spend more time reading. It sparked that restless energy that I tend to get every few months, accompanied by mental images of me in a chaise lounge dripping in afternoon sun, feeding myself grapes while the hands of a clock on the wall behind me make laps around the face and a large stack of books on the coffee table rapidly diminishes. Oh, just imagine me reading! Imagine me jotting little thoughts down in a Moleskine notebook!
It’s probably because of that restless feeling that all my favorite things to read are about other people reading. Given how little I read myself (hard data to follow), I think I must get vicarious pleasure or a sense of accomplishment from these types of readings — reading about reading makes me feel like I’ve read more than I have, like some kind of pyramid scheme of reading.
A great outlet for that has been Substack, obviously. I’ve enjoyed John Warner’s newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, which tends to hang around in the intersection of writing, education, technology, and politics (Warner is writing a book about what the act of writing still means in a post-AI world, which comes out in February) and has a fun feature where he recommends books to subscribers based on a list they send in of 5 books they recently enjoyed. I also like Derek Krissoff’s Book Work and Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press, which are primarily about the publishing industry (in the University Press and Small Press worlds, respectively) but inevitably also touch on books and reading. And sometimes Garth Greenwell’s To a Green Thought, though I don’t always have the energy for his erudition.
Most recently, I’ve stumbled onto Celine Nguyen’s fantastic personal canon, which offers a monthly reading round-up (often 12 or 13 books in a month! how does she do it!) as well as critical essays about literature and design, usually centered around the books she’s reading. She’s fun and accessible while also being incredibly insightful, but most importantly (for my purposes) her work is an invitation into the world of reading and writing. She’s cultivated what looks like a very fruitful reading and writing practice over the last couple of years, and she seems convinced that her readers can cultivate something similar for themselves, if they haven’t already.
I believe her, and reading the newsletter motivates me. In “how to change your life, part 2,” she writes about someone else’s book review that
“helped me see my hapless, inadequate pretensions with a bit more compassion. Phoniness wasn’t a sign I was fundamentally, intrinsically unworthy of my aspirations. Phoniness was, in fact, an essential part of any aspirational project.”
At the end of another piece, “seeing like a simulation,” she quotes from another newsletter in which Kate Wagner writes,
“You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward.”
For me, these humble and positive thoughts have been what I needed to grapple with an internal resistance to practice, a voice that sounds like this:
Going on two years since I tweeted this, and not much has changed in my reading habits. Whenever people see the books in my room for the first time, they ask me if I’ve read them all, and I laugh.
I like to think of myself as A READER, books are a big part of my personality (I even have a graduate degree in writing), but I’ve read at a pace of about 10 or fewer books a year for the past few years. My not-reading doesn’t seem to match the person I like to imagine that I am, and I’m embarrassed.
For a while I blamed my not-reading on the fact that I read a lot for work — of course, I thought, it’s probably hard to enjoy doing for fun what I already do for money — but this year I transitioned into a more administrative role that doesn’t require me to read much at all, and I haven’t seen my reading habits improve. So it’s looking like I might have to face up to the real culprits: the afternoon hammock naps in the yard, the thirty hours a week I spend at the bars, the insidious feeling that there’s really little point to any active engagement with life or with matter or with my own thoughts or with what other people have said or are saying, and on and on.
One day I’ll have to accept that I’m not a reader — but not today! Today is about starting to figure out how to sustain a consistent reading practice (and maybe, just maybe, a consistent writing practice).
To that end, I recently started the time consuming and mostly futile task of indexing the books I own in a spreadsheet. I started by indexing the books in my room, excluding the books in the boxes I forced my parents to store in various closets of their Ohio home before I moved across the Atlantic. If nothing else, this gave me little insights into what I’m not reading, or how I’m not reading.
I don’t read books that people lend me. And since it’s embarrassing to return a borrowed book you haven’t read, I don’t return them. Six books on my shelves are borrowed, and they’ve all been here a long time.
The books I own in French are almost all unread. Reading in French is harder for me than reading in English, and since I’m already not reading in English…
Of the 53 books in my room that I’ve read (out of almost 300), 12 are nonfiction (mostly some kind of criticism), and 27 are essay/memoir, and of the 70 books I’ve started but never finished, 22 are nonfiction and 26 are essay/memoir. So this confirms what I said earlier about what I like to read (books about books, reading about reading).
etc for now, there’s more to be uncovered, I imagine
What I’m calling an index is probably less sophisticated than what you’re picturing. It isn’t alphabetized or anything. Some of the books by the same authors aren’t even next to each other. It is very broadly grouped by genre. It looks like this:
The more I look at this spreadsheet, the more it feels like a litany of my best unfulfilled intentions — the hobbies and interests that never got off the ground; the former teachers’ books I never finished, not because I didn’t love them (the books) (and the teachers) but because of the aforementioned naps and bars and terrible fear of living.
But I think there’s an obstacle here that has less to do with my precarious mental health. It’s that reading has for a long time been too entangled with how I define myself to myself, which inevitably introduces a pressure or sense of duty and dampens the possibilities for a practice of reading centered purely on enjoyment/interest. I’ll come back to Nick Hornby here:
"There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they're a few letters short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy."
Aspiring to be a Person of Letters hasn’t kept me reading, so I’m going to try loving books and see how that goes.
My plan is to read a book every week and to write a little substack post every month to proclaim my love. Practice is the name of the game. And if it takes root, maybe one day I’ll beat my reading debt and “catch up.” Maybe I’ll finish all the books in my room and start unboxing the books clogging up my parents’ closet space. Maybe a day will come, toward the end of my long, long life, when I’ve read ALL of the books I own, and then I will be the master of my destiny, and the gods will set me up in that golden chaise lounge on some undiscovered mountaintop out of reach, forever.