none of us have enough time. ever. and all of us readers stack up more reading than anyone could read ever. in that contest, losses are going to be inevitable. i try not to worry about what gets left aside as long as I'm putting in a good couple of solid deep reading hours in a day. also i try to keep my newspapers / magazines / substacks for my mornings and my novel / critical readings for the afternoon/evening.
when it comes to finding free time in a neoliberal society, we all do the best we can. i might be childless but i am acutely aware that my parent friends are lucky to piece together 30 minutes a day for alone-time (as for the moms in my circle, even 30 minutes is a lot). understand; i'm not talking about everyone; just my little circle. my sense is that as long as we read a little every day or nearly every day we're still in the game. reading is a skill and a muscle, a praxis and a gateway but the muscle part is key. as anyone who works out will tell you, the difference between zero conditioning and even a little is, well, intergalactic. so even if you only put in 30 minutes of reading on a treadmill you are on your way to the stars.
Social media really does mess with my attention span, too. The reason I first subscribed to the New Yorker in my 20s, actually, was because I worked in social media/tech in San Francisco. One day I noticed my ability to concentrate was just... shot. I got scared it would never come back. All the language that surrounded me was business jargon startup nonsense. My friends' bookshelves were all covered in self-help and productivity hacks. Literally felt like my brain had shrunk, and I wanted to prove to myself I was still capable of reading and absorbing a long form article or story in one sitting. Forced myself to actually read on the MUNI home after work every day. That's around the time I discovered "A Cheater's Guide to Love": a great reward!
Yes. Many solid points. I loved King's On Writing. His ability to sit down and do the deal--his discipline--is otherworldly and can teach all of us a thing or twenty about the craft of writing. You nailed it re the lack of reading nowadays. The problem, as you said, is also how little people are reading. (Even if it's amazing that reading has held out as much as it has.) Another problem, it seems to me, is WHAT people are reading. You're correct to nail down social media as one of the biggest problems here, one of the strongest distractions. It also makes me think of our incredibly dumb, binary, immature, overly simplistic culture war fights at the moment. I think a lot of this stuff on both sides comes back down to a lack of reading. People don't read anymore. They don't understand history or the basics of how things work in society. They (young people especially) know almost nothing about their own country. It's quite astonishing. When I lived in NYC I joined a writing group and most of the people under say 30 more or less didn't read; they "listened to podcasts." That kinda says it all. Nowadays you are culturally incentivized NOT to think., especially not critically or outside your prescribed tribe. What if you were to read something that cracked open your preconceived notions of things? Uhhhh ohhhh: Then you'd really be in trouble. It's much safer and easier to keep your head down, follow your tribe's dictates, listen to the "right" podcasts, throw mud at anyone on the "other side," and turn your brain off. If you do read, it's better to read highly political, highly polarized, one-sided polemical diatribes masquerading as "literature" which confirm your own tribal biases.
Junot, thank you for your reading advice. One problem I have is that I'm overwhelmed with all I want to read; the question is how to pick. In addition to books, there is the New Yorker, and other literary magazines, and substacks, and newspapers, etc. Given there is only 24 hours in a day, and during half we are asleep, what advice to you have for writers as to how to pick our reading material? Thx.
Hi Sheilah, I don’t have the “answer” of course but wrote a post about this from the perspective of an English teacher and researcher. Essentially I think choosing something you think is worthwhile and taking even just 15 minutes with it is worth more than an hour of mindless reading or floating and that if we choose to do this we may end up paradoxically reading more. Anyway I’ve thought about this a lot seeing students sort of frozen because of what you describe and witnessed it in myself, so I sat down a while to have a go at what was going on :)
I had similar goals and tricks, but it has been impossible to read a book a week since joining Substack. For those of us who aren't well-known, we need to network, read, and comment on each other's work several hours a day to create a newsletter with income. I love engaging with brilliant writers, but I wish sitting with a book gave us similar opportunities.
I subscribed due to this post, and also in hopes of finding as much food as possible about when you're writing something big and are plagued with self-doubt and self-hate most of the time.
You have the assurance of having published and won a PP. You have that to point to when everyone tells you that you 600 word novel is manure. I have a few short stories published in little journals.
Less to point to when I'm reading my 1000 words the following day and hating 85% of it.
Writing about how you deal with this kind of syndrome, if at all, will be consumed with great interest. This bit about reading every single day, I believe, is an important part of the life raft strategy. Inspired words of fiction light a fire that burns away psychological dross, and therefore, it's to be taken like a prescribed medicine.
Love reading about your process. Wish I could find an hour a day to read, though that becomes difficult with little kids. I share your belief however that you must make time for it (especially as writers). I do the majority of my reading these days at the gym, on the treadmill as I walk uphill for 30 minutes. I look forward to this cherished sliver of time and try to steal a few minutes more here and there when I can. Excellent post. Looking forward to more.
1: I understand from the post how Twitter -- even as text -- doesn't encourage the right mental reading ecology that then leads to really deep, interesting reading later (and writing).
What about other kinds of writing? Specifically, text exchanges online with other people. Maybe long conversations on Reddit, Discord, Telegram. Maybe communicative text -- much like Twitter -- doesn't encourage the right headspace? The old romantic days of writing epic letters, sliding into DMs is not.
2: I've always been told that to really appreciate a piece of writing, you have to spend time with it. But this can lead to re-reading the first chapter three, four times without making progress, even getting stuck on a particularly rich paragraph... This is especially so for dense, complicated works. Is there a trained element of flowing through a work, of feeling the rhythm the writer intends, carrying forward instead of obsessing on a detail? Wondering this specifically in reaction to the idea of finishing a book every 3-10 days. That seems to show you're not getting into too deep of a rut on any one work as a reader.
matthew thank you for the 2-piece question. 1) i only have my very limited experience to go by - my insights are homebrews at best. having never spent a lot of time on reddit or discord etc im not sure what kind of deliberation they encourage. one really has to suss these things out for themselves to figure what allows for deeper deliberation and what doesnt. not everything is the same for everyone clearly. 2) all reading helps your reading muscles. sometimes reading leaves you frustrated and banging your head against a book's opacities; some reading is so effortless it almost seem not to count as reading. you need all those different fibers in your reading muscle. over the course of my reading life ive learned to walk away from books when it wasn't doing anything for me and i wasn't doing much for its particular genius but that was not always instinct that came easy to me.
Love all this! Just to piggy back a tiny bit: I love reading ABOUT reading (this post included). Matthew, if you're interested, there was a great book way back when called THE SHALLOWS By Nicholas Carr about this very subject. More recently, Maryanne Wolf wrote READER COME HOME: THE READING BRAIN IN A DIGITAL WORLD. Sort of a deep, neurosciencey-dive into the subject.
I tend to read for several hours a day but I feel that I don’t get a lot out of the short stories that I read. I wonder if I should start taking notes. I’m just about finished with A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by George Saunders but I think I should read it again at some point.
I enjoyed The Ghosts of Gloria Lara in the New Yorker but I had trouble with Varities of Exile by Mavis Gallant.
Such a lovely message to also acknowledge our constraints. I always think reading a little mindfully is better than consuming (ie headlines and skimming), though that serves a purpose at times. It can feel overwhelming where to start, but even a few pages or a single poem can be powerful. I wrote an article about this - read less but read better - and my conclusion was we often end up reading more with this mindset. In any case, we all have to make conscious choices of how to privilege our time. 💥 🩵
none of us have enough time. ever. and all of us readers stack up more reading than anyone could read ever. in that contest, losses are going to be inevitable. i try not to worry about what gets left aside as long as I'm putting in a good couple of solid deep reading hours in a day. also i try to keep my newspapers / magazines / substacks for my mornings and my novel / critical readings for the afternoon/evening.
when it comes to finding free time in a neoliberal society, we all do the best we can. i might be childless but i am acutely aware that my parent friends are lucky to piece together 30 minutes a day for alone-time (as for the moms in my circle, even 30 minutes is a lot). understand; i'm not talking about everyone; just my little circle. my sense is that as long as we read a little every day or nearly every day we're still in the game. reading is a skill and a muscle, a praxis and a gateway but the muscle part is key. as anyone who works out will tell you, the difference between zero conditioning and even a little is, well, intergalactic. so even if you only put in 30 minutes of reading on a treadmill you are on your way to the stars.
sorry that last line was not clear - fixed it. basically, a coming soon! and thank you so much for joining us!
Social media really does mess with my attention span, too. The reason I first subscribed to the New Yorker in my 20s, actually, was because I worked in social media/tech in San Francisco. One day I noticed my ability to concentrate was just... shot. I got scared it would never come back. All the language that surrounded me was business jargon startup nonsense. My friends' bookshelves were all covered in self-help and productivity hacks. Literally felt like my brain had shrunk, and I wanted to prove to myself I was still capable of reading and absorbing a long form article or story in one sitting. Forced myself to actually read on the MUNI home after work every day. That's around the time I discovered "A Cheater's Guide to Love": a great reward!
please forgive my delay, matthew has it correct (thank you matthew). the rest of the "simplicities" will be up asap!
Yes. Many solid points. I loved King's On Writing. His ability to sit down and do the deal--his discipline--is otherworldly and can teach all of us a thing or twenty about the craft of writing. You nailed it re the lack of reading nowadays. The problem, as you said, is also how little people are reading. (Even if it's amazing that reading has held out as much as it has.) Another problem, it seems to me, is WHAT people are reading. You're correct to nail down social media as one of the biggest problems here, one of the strongest distractions. It also makes me think of our incredibly dumb, binary, immature, overly simplistic culture war fights at the moment. I think a lot of this stuff on both sides comes back down to a lack of reading. People don't read anymore. They don't understand history or the basics of how things work in society. They (young people especially) know almost nothing about their own country. It's quite astonishing. When I lived in NYC I joined a writing group and most of the people under say 30 more or less didn't read; they "listened to podcasts." That kinda says it all. Nowadays you are culturally incentivized NOT to think., especially not critically or outside your prescribed tribe. What if you were to read something that cracked open your preconceived notions of things? Uhhhh ohhhh: Then you'd really be in trouble. It's much safer and easier to keep your head down, follow your tribe's dictates, listen to the "right" podcasts, throw mud at anyone on the "other side," and turn your brain off. If you do read, it's better to read highly political, highly polarized, one-sided polemical diatribes masquerading as "literature" which confirm your own tribal biases.
Michael Mohr
"Sincere American Writing"
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Junot, thank you for your reading advice. One problem I have is that I'm overwhelmed with all I want to read; the question is how to pick. In addition to books, there is the New Yorker, and other literary magazines, and substacks, and newspapers, etc. Given there is only 24 hours in a day, and during half we are asleep, what advice to you have for writers as to how to pick our reading material? Thx.
Hi Sheilah, I don’t have the “answer” of course but wrote a post about this from the perspective of an English teacher and researcher. Essentially I think choosing something you think is worthwhile and taking even just 15 minutes with it is worth more than an hour of mindless reading or floating and that if we choose to do this we may end up paradoxically reading more. Anyway I’ve thought about this a lot seeing students sort of frozen because of what you describe and witnessed it in myself, so I sat down a while to have a go at what was going on :)
Would love your thoughts as well...
I had similar goals and tricks, but it has been impossible to read a book a week since joining Substack. For those of us who aren't well-known, we need to network, read, and comment on each other's work several hours a day to create a newsletter with income. I love engaging with brilliant writers, but I wish sitting with a book gave us similar opportunities.
I subscribed due to this post, and also in hopes of finding as much food as possible about when you're writing something big and are plagued with self-doubt and self-hate most of the time.
You have the assurance of having published and won a PP. You have that to point to when everyone tells you that you 600 word novel is manure. I have a few short stories published in little journals.
Less to point to when I'm reading my 1000 words the following day and hating 85% of it.
Writing about how you deal with this kind of syndrome, if at all, will be consumed with great interest. This bit about reading every single day, I believe, is an important part of the life raft strategy. Inspired words of fiction light a fire that burns away psychological dross, and therefore, it's to be taken like a prescribed medicine.
Love reading about your process. Wish I could find an hour a day to read, though that becomes difficult with little kids. I share your belief however that you must make time for it (especially as writers). I do the majority of my reading these days at the gym, on the treadmill as I walk uphill for 30 minutes. I look forward to this cherished sliver of time and try to steal a few minutes more here and there when I can. Excellent post. Looking forward to more.
Curious if you read with a pen/pencil in hand, marking up your books with marginalia?
pen and computer both. books definitely marked up
What do you note in fiction? Underlining parts you might use as inspiration, marking things that remind you of other works as a way to engage?
Two questions!
1: I understand from the post how Twitter -- even as text -- doesn't encourage the right mental reading ecology that then leads to really deep, interesting reading later (and writing).
What about other kinds of writing? Specifically, text exchanges online with other people. Maybe long conversations on Reddit, Discord, Telegram. Maybe communicative text -- much like Twitter -- doesn't encourage the right headspace? The old romantic days of writing epic letters, sliding into DMs is not.
2: I've always been told that to really appreciate a piece of writing, you have to spend time with it. But this can lead to re-reading the first chapter three, four times without making progress, even getting stuck on a particularly rich paragraph... This is especially so for dense, complicated works. Is there a trained element of flowing through a work, of feeling the rhythm the writer intends, carrying forward instead of obsessing on a detail? Wondering this specifically in reaction to the idea of finishing a book every 3-10 days. That seems to show you're not getting into too deep of a rut on any one work as a reader.
matthew thank you for the 2-piece question. 1) i only have my very limited experience to go by - my insights are homebrews at best. having never spent a lot of time on reddit or discord etc im not sure what kind of deliberation they encourage. one really has to suss these things out for themselves to figure what allows for deeper deliberation and what doesnt. not everything is the same for everyone clearly. 2) all reading helps your reading muscles. sometimes reading leaves you frustrated and banging your head against a book's opacities; some reading is so effortless it almost seem not to count as reading. you need all those different fibers in your reading muscle. over the course of my reading life ive learned to walk away from books when it wasn't doing anything for me and i wasn't doing much for its particular genius but that was not always instinct that came easy to me.
thank you very much for this detailed response. :)
Love all this! Just to piggy back a tiny bit: I love reading ABOUT reading (this post included). Matthew, if you're interested, there was a great book way back when called THE SHALLOWS By Nicholas Carr about this very subject. More recently, Maryanne Wolf wrote READER COME HOME: THE READING BRAIN IN A DIGITAL WORLD. Sort of a deep, neurosciencey-dive into the subject.
I tend to read for several hours a day but I feel that I don’t get a lot out of the short stories that I read. I wonder if I should start taking notes. I’m just about finished with A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by George Saunders but I think I should read it again at some point.
I enjoyed The Ghosts of Gloria Lara in the New Yorker but I had trouble with Varities of Exile by Mavis Gallant.
Such a lovely message to also acknowledge our constraints. I always think reading a little mindfully is better than consuming (ie headlines and skimming), though that serves a purpose at times. It can feel overwhelming where to start, but even a few pages or a single poem can be powerful. I wrote an article about this - read less but read better - and my conclusion was we often end up reading more with this mindset. In any case, we all have to make conscious choices of how to privilege our time. 💥 🩵
Have I misunderstood? “Now onto the other two simplicities,” because there’s only “Share” and “Subscribed” that follows.
Like Brandon Ward, I too am “happy to be here,” and as a patron of the arts no less.
I believe the author plans to write 1-2 more posts discussing these other two simplicities, but will only have a tiny sample of it for free readers.