Reading (Books) for Pleasure - Who Has the Time?

Peupliers, temps gris, Éragny (1895), Camille Pissarro, The Art Gallery of Ontario

A lovely young student comes to see me in the Writing Centre at York. She is full of curiosity and ambition. But tells me that though she is a literature major she doesn’t read that much on her own time. Even when school is off she doesn’t. A lit major. She likes to read to analyze. As if the books were but a prompt from which to write her discursive essays. I managed not to ask if ever she read for pleasure. And while I understand this way of reading - like hunting for didactic treasure - is a common phenomenon, particularly in English departments, for me this is like going to a house of worship just to hear the sermon. You’re missing the music - the only part I’ve ever come close to glimpsing a spiritual thing resembling what some call God.

Put another way, as J.D. Salinger says in the epigraph to his last published book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

We live now in a time when reading books as Salinger would have had us read them is becoming an ever more rare and difficult thing and it’s as if those that want to do it in some kind of “serious” way need to do it with specific purpose. Otherwise it’s a waste of time. Most educated folks don’t put it so bluntly. But rather ask, how do you find the time?

Funny you should ask.

When I was initially jotting ideas (in my iPhone) for this post on the subway the other day I thought this would remain an unfinished draft, like so many others. To not so secretly espouse my beliefs that reading is valuable. Could there be a more boring or obvious blog topic for a teacher/writer? What inspired me to actually write the post out was something I was reading the other morning, or trying to whilst one of my children was having a tantrum (fun fun fun). A non-fiction book The Shallows, a 2011 Pulitzer finalist based on an Atlantic magazine article with a much better title: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

It was reading of how profoundly the internet is rewiring our brains. The benefits, as the author, Nicholas Carr, makes sure to include, are so numerous as to be mind-blogging. When we consider how one little pocket-sized machine can be our calendar, our journal, our phone, our social community, our information centre, our entertainment centre, our timer, our meditation guide and on and on.

We’re equally familiar with the flip side. That is, what we’re sacrificing in exchange for these incredible conveniences. Carr says we can hardly take a deep dive into a long text, so busy are we skimming the surfaces of twelve different texts at once. Just as we asked at the advent of television or radio before it, Carr reminds us the question is age old: Is this new thingamajig an agent for good or evil?

Wth the internet the intuitive answer would seem to be it’s up to the user. But Carr suggests this isn’t true, which is what sprung me to action to write this post. It reminded me that like cigarettes to the smoker or marijuana to the pothead, the addict is ever in denial - believing they are in control of their addiction. I do it because I like to. I do it when I want. We say this about the internet all the time. As if we are only looking at what we want, as if we are only looking when we want. To that I say psha, good sir. P-sha.

The few pages of the book I read reminded me that we are are now engaging with the world differently. Our concentration brutally fragmented. Am I the only one who can’t make it through a TV show episode anymore without also doing something (twitter) on my phone? Worse, if the series I’m watching (Billions this week), starts to get intense, or there’s a scene where my attention lags, I’ll actually physically pause the show, go open youtube in another tab and search for a short clip, often an interview, something from a favoured podcast. Then I’ll go down the youtube rabbit hole a while before returning to my show, if I return at all. Avid sports fans I know can no longer stick to a single sport on a given night.

If that’s not scrambling hell out of our brains…

Nevertheless, the world has historically, at least, been pretty good at finding balance. It’s for good reason we’re taking up yoga and meditation in such large numbers. We don’t just want to use our bodies we want to do it in communal spaces. In a similar vein, I have a pet theory that all the nail salons and therapeutic massage places I see around Toronto (the likes of which I hardly remember seeing growing up) are a result of people’s deeper need for some kind of contact, a kind of intimacy we’re beginning to crave. That human contact is becoming the more valuable commodity (again).

For the problem of our addictions runs far deeper than mere loneliness and an inability to concentrate. In October 2017 The New York Times Magazine had this bolded ALL CAPS question splashed across its feature article: WHY ARE MORE AMERICAN TEENAGERS THAN EVER SUFFERING FROM SEVERE ANXIETY? This is clearly one of the great issues of our time. Those little mega computers in our pockets if not the problem then a massive part of it. And if we wonder what our phones — our online addiction — is doing to us as adults, well the ramifications for today’s youth who have grown up knowing no alternative is even more concerning.

I initially thought I was writing a post about reading books (since I’d recently done one about a writing trick that’s changed my fiction writing forever — there’s a reading tip in this post later for those interested) to promote it the way I do with my university students. That if you read just ten minutes a day, of something you like, I’m careful to add (not something you’ve been forced to read), it will change your mastery of the language. Read something you want to read, something that’s almost like candy for you, be it Harry Potter or a funny travel book by Will Ferguson, a book about outer space or one about the origin of our species (Noah Yuval Harari seems to be in the eye of the zeitgeist right now), anything regularly read, especially if you’re not in the habit, will change both the way you speak and the way you write. If you read even just a paragraph of something a person has written as often as I do, you quickly learn to assess how much of a reader they are. In short, I thought I’d write this as a means to promote literacy, a grander lexicon, you know the old-school English teacher stuff.

But after reading the opening pages of Carr’s book, I realize it is in fact the meditative, immersive experience that a paper and ink book provides that I’m most interested in proselytizing.

For the record, one Malcom Gladwell book aside (Outliers) I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a book in a single day. I’ve never been one to read in hour-long spans, never mind those that can sit and read without pause for hours plural. It’s taken me decades to understand that in things reading I am a sprinter. The long-distance just isn’t for me. Ten minutes is a pretty perfect length for me (I’m talking book reading here — like everyone else I can skip and skim from one article to the next online for much, much longer). On a Sunday morning, if the kids are still asleep or playing nicely enough, I can do twenty minutes with a good book. That’s usually about as much I like to read in a stretch, especially with fiction, with literature, where the sentences are worth taking in, and the thoughts are deep, the characters ones you want to spend time with, get to know.

That secret to reading fast is not speed reading, which is mostly bullshit, assuming you aren’t just reading for simple content. We can all skim a cereal box, a dentist’s teeth whitening brochure. I gather that if you’re in the legal or financial fields this too is a skill of much use/value. But if you’re reading to learn something at any level of depth, or reading as I do, for pleasure, for comfort, for the soul, then I don’t believe you can race through.

I’ve always considered myself a terribly slow reader. For perspective, I’ve never read 50 books in a year (and I’ve been keeping track). But I have started reading more this last half decade than I ever did before. A couple friends have even referred to me as a fast reader, which feels strange because I’ve always been convinced I’m profoundly slow. I realize then, however, what it is. What it’s always been. Time.

A fast reader is not one who flips pages at a far fast clip than her peers. This is the great misnomer. The fast reader is simply the one who reads more often. My mother could whip through a book in a few days because not only could she could read in hour-long stretches. but for a book that grabbed her, on a weekend day, she could read those hour-long stretches multiple times a day. She would find times mid-afternoon when lying down for a nap, late in the night when she couldn’t sleep, or in the early morning. One reads slowly when one hardly reads at all. Most of us, in other words. For years I couldn’t understand why I read so little until I realized, my favourite time to read, other than on moving trains and subways, is in bed, before I go to sleep. The “smart” phone and having children have shrunk that time down dramatically.

With the aim to read far more, I decided that if I could find an hour a day to watch something on Netflix or the like I should be reading at least as much, or so is the ideal. Because I’m a sprinter, I now tend to break it down. Ten/fifteen minutes on the subway ride to work. The same again on the way back. A few minutes here and there in between sometimes (on the toilet if you must know). But the key for me now, over and above the minutes I’ll read in bed is to get in at least half an hour in the evening, sitting upright. Screens off. All of them. This is what has sped things up for me book-reading wise.

I fail at this regularly, mind you. I know because I time it, clocking it into my phone each time I pick up my book. I do this because like my father I’m a bit of a nut for things numbers related. So I know that even reaching a single hour a day is not easy for me. But when I can dim the living room, and read by lamp light after the kids have gone to bed, my phone a little further out of reach or at least out of sight, this is a calm thing. It helps with my writing and speaking too.

I imagine this is only convincing to those who like me believe in the book as something almost spiritual in how it can ease the soul even as it stimulates the mind. A beautiful line describing a particularly magnificent horse in Texas in one of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy westerns is for me as beautiful as that sun setting into the sea on Manuel Antonio beach, Costa Rica circa 1998 (or thereabouts). The way a single line of prose can open out whole vistas of view and the possibilities of what can be, and how big life really is. It takes me out of myself as it connects me to the greater whole. The music of the language, the flow of a Murakami paragraph, a line where he describes the “dry sound of sand-filled wind” blowing against a woman’s windows. That line alone enough to stop me, to give me the kind of pleasure I might get looking at a farming scene in a Pissarro painting.

Time becomes precious with age. I’ve been pushed faster toward an understanding of my mortality with the passing of one parent, and the other slowly dying of a “long-term degenerative disorder of the nervous system”. In this I know I am not alone. Where exercise classes and the need to unwind with something easy on Netflix makes so much sense, to me and everyone else, books remain a challenge. Because they are hard. A bit like going to a house of worship in that sense..

But God and art, these things both can feel rather loaded or uncomfortable for people. Nature on the other hand is universal. Everyone gets it: the ocean, the mountains, the forest, trees. My first year students often challenge the notion of reading without purpose. What’s the point they want to know? The Google Age when everything must have an answer, and fast. Except that the place where wonder and magic exist, easy answers, or certainly logical ones are never what’s needed nor found. Explaining why one would spend one’s time reading literature, that would be like trying to understand why sit by the ocean waves on a beach at night, or look longingly out a friend’s farm’s window at a copse of trees. Does it really need explaining at all?