HOW TO DOOMPROOF YOUR READING

detail from Atlantee’s Fahrenheit 451

When it comes to reading and book culture, the news has been anything but reassuring. Publishers are consolidating, book sales are sagging (unlike book bans, which are proliferating), and in the United States you’re lucky if an adult reads a single book a year. All of us in the book world have anecdotes that adumbrate the decline: mine comes out of my teaching. Call it the tale of two syllabi. At the start of my professorial career, I regularly assigned my students six full novels in a semester without eliciting much complaint, and believe it or not, the percentage of the class that read all the books was pretty high; now if I assign a single novel (and a short one at that) I’m grateful if half the students manage to finish the book.

But it ain’t only regular folks or debt-shackled students pulling back from the pages. Even those of us for whom reading is our prime passion struggle to find the time to read—at the same pace, with the same peace of mind—as in previous years. There are plenty of reasons for this lectoral erosion, but the main culprits are easily identified: our screen-fracked minds and a neoliberal-induced reactivity, a hegemonic structure of feeling that discourages any and all contemplative practices.

One can quibble over etiology, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that like our environment book reading is trending down. (But unlike with our environment, almost no one denies—or cares enough to deny—reading’s diminishment.) To give readers our due, we are holding the line better than anyone might have predicted, given the attention-devouring forces arrayed against us. But nevertheless, in spite our heroic efforts, the writing (on reading) is on the proverbial wall: we’re entering, or have already entered, an antilexic age. What remains to be decided is whether this age is ultimately reversible, or if it heralds a true reading apocalypse.

Me, I’m an optimist. I believe that books and the reading of them will survive and eventually return with greater force for the very same reason that books and reading have proven, even in retreat, so difficult to defeat. Because books are, ultimately, everything. It’s true: books are miracles, they are magic¹, they are truth². Books make us free³, they make us human⁴, they give life⁵, they save life⁶, they inspire, illuminate, entertain, connect⁷, open⁸, and pierce us⁹. Books are doors¹⁰, they are windows¹¹, they are mirrors¹², they are friends¹³, they are teachers¹⁴ and remind us we are not alone¹⁵—they are journeys, prayers, guided meditation¹⁶, and they can stop time¹⁷. Books give us words for what we already know¹⁸ and are a refuge from almost all the miseries of life¹⁹ as well as a key to unknown chambers within the castle of our own self²⁰. Books help create us²¹—our thoughts, our tempers, our souls²²—and allow us slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul²³. Books change lives²⁴, are a home, a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a counselor, a multitude of counselors²⁵— they make us all immigrants²⁶ and they are medicine²⁷. Books are stars, living fires to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe²⁸. Books, all books, are the measure of our lives, and they are small private acts of resistance²⁹; books free us from of the predatory extractivist hyperspace of Capital and deliver us to the Slow Zone of human relatedness; books put us back into contact with our fractured, alienated selves, with the communities that comprise us (living, imagined, dead), and reassemble our keening fragmentations into something that might be called a conversation—or better still, a reckoning.

I could go on, but what’s important to remember is that for all their sublimities, books and the reading of them will not survive, much less regenerate, without a hard protracted lucha against overwhelming forces. In preparation for the long twilight struggle, we all have to come up with strategies, with practices, with anarchist lectoral calisthenics (of the James C. Scott kind), in the hopes of doomproofing whatever is best about our book reading cultures.

These are the strategies that I’m currently pursuing. Please share yours. We’ll need everything we can get.

ONE    read hungrily.

To put it simply, we should all read as many books as possible. If you can’t read a book a week, read a book a month, but whatever you do keep reading and keep wanting to read more than you already do.  A hungry reader is always trying to fit another book into their schedule.

TWO    read adventurously.

Don’t just read the genres you like or are familiar with. Vary your reading as much as possible. Try to read both contemporary and older books and always read books in translation.  That way you’re not exclusively trapped in neoliberalism’s perpetual present or in the headlock of US literary culture.

I have a book circuit: I read a fiction, a non-fiction, a book of scholarship, a comic, and a book of poetry and then I start the cycle all over again. Two of these books always are translations; two of them are always older.

Create your own book circuit. Reading, after all, like exercise, requires us to push ourselves, to work out muscles we would rather not work out, for best results.

THREE    read blasphemously.

Read books and writers that lay outside or athwart your political/identitarian comfort zone. I’m not saying read books/writers that want to see you dead or in a camp but just try, every now and then, to have contact with books that might not be your natural interlocutor, books that might not be your friend.

In an age like ours where folks are more partisan, more divided, more stuck in their networks than ever before, where the various sides often view each other as irredeemable and evil, my suggestion to fraternize with the enemy will strike some as straight up treason, as blasphemy.

Frankly, we could all use a whole lot more blasphemy.

Given the future that awaits all humanity, our age’s polarizing, atomizing, anti-solidaritous sword logic will not avail us—our political/identitarian purities will, in fact, doom us. If we are going to survive our dystopian future (and overcome our vampire hegemons), we will need to speak to each other across what will seem like impossible gulfs of difference. We will need to “accomplish ‘big things’ with and for people we don’t know or necessarily like”³⁰ ; and build family with people who are not family.  We will need to betray the mandates of our sides and learn to thrive in (or at least endure) blasphemous solidarities³¹.

No better place to practice (or keep alive the hope of) this utopian imaginary than in our reading.

Because if we can’t practice radical solidarities in the safety of books, what hope have we for practicing them in the messiness of our real world?

This essay will be cross-posted in the Heresy Press newsletter

1. Stephen King, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” Ray Bradbury, “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” Alice Hoffman, “Books may well be the only true magic.”

2. Gao Xingjian, “It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” Frederick Douglass, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

4. Leslie Marmon Silko, “Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don't have the stories, you don't have anything.”

5. Henry David Thoreau, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." Maya Angelou, “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

6. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.” Laurie Anderson, “Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”

7. James Baldwin, “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

8. Andre Dubus, “A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

9. Aldous Huxley, “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.”

10. Jeanette Winterson, “Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

11. Henry Ward Beecher, “Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows.”

12. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, ““Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”"

13. Henry Miller, “A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.”

14. Charles W. Eliot, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”

15. C.S. Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.”

16. George Saunders, “Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.”"

17. Dave Eggers, “Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this.”

18. Alberto Manguel, “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”

19. W. Somerset Maugham, “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

20. Franz Kafka, “Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?”

21. Octavia Butler, “Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

22. Ursula K. Le Guin, “And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

23. Joyce Carol Oates, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”

24. LLoyd Alexander, “Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.”

25. Charles W. Eliot, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”

26. Jean Rhys, “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds home for us everywhere.”

27. Leslie Marmon Silko, “Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen.” Sandra Cisneros, “Books are medicine and you have to take the right medicine that you need at that moment or that day or that time in your life. Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that’s because you needed them to nourish your alma.”

28. Madeleine L’Engle, “A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”"

29. Toni Morrison, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” “Small acts of resistance” from private communication

30. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, quoted in “Divesting from Carceral Thinking,” Mariame Kaba and Andred Ritchie, Boston Review, Issue 2024:2

31. I discussed these in my Kindred review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/octavia-butlers-blasphemous-solidarities/