reading instead of scrolling will make you happier
'couch to 5k' for reading, week 2: some lovely readers have made us *trackers*! and: how has it gone?! how are you enjoying it?
update! chat! trackers! live!
So FIRST OF ALL, my goodness what a response this week! If you haven’t, please come and check out the chat where people are sharing what they’re reading and any challenges they’re having with it. People are giving each other advice, which is THE BEST. I am trying to check in regularly and offer solutions/alternative assignments where needed. I will keep doing open threads there I think.
AND LOOK AT THESE TRACKERS. Some lovely fans of the C25K4Reading (that abbreviation doesn’t really work… or does it?) on Bluesky have made the following for us:
I am so delighted and honoured. The way you can tell that you’ve made something that resonates with and works for people is that people you don’t know start coming in with extra things to help it be better. It was just the same when we launched Zombies, Run! actually (btw did you know it’s still going and we just launched some new missions?!) - there were pre-fans, people who backed it on Kickstarter and immediately started giving us help and advice because they so much wanted this to exist and they could see it would work for them. (There is a separate conversation here about how the internet has dissolved the barrier between audience and creator in a way that can feel intimidating but can also be UNUTTERABLY WONDERFUL. To make things with your audience instead of just for them - or even worse at them - is to feel carried along, supported and sustained in the best way.) Thank you, designers who made these things for us all.
There have been some questions about “what counts?” Does reading Private Eye count? Do art books count? My answer to you is: does it feel like this is reading you wish you were doing more of, but you’re not? In that case, it counts. If it is what you were already doing and feel you’d like to be doing maybe less of, it does not count. We are here to support each other to do some things we were finding challenging before.
ALSO this coming week I am going to give a go to the following thing: on Friday 17th I will do a very short Substack Live, from 1.40pm-2pm UK time which will literally just be for our 15-minute read. I will be reading in silence, we can pop into the text box what we’re reading if we like, I will not eg be sending that Substack Live out afterwards! I thought this was a good time as a lunchbreak read for UK readers, and 8.40-9am ‘just before starting work’ for readers on the East Coast. Sorry West Coast readers - if this goes well my thought is that I can do some at lunchtime and also some at eg 2pmPT/5pmET/10pm UK. Reading is good (anytime but also) at transition points in the day. Anyway we’ll have an experiment! If it’s just me reading for a few minutes by myself, oh well!
I want to read more because reading makes me happy
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about why we read, and there are so many different reasons. Like, why is it worth doing a Couch to 5K program for reading? It’s actually quite hard to explain if it’s not immediately obvious to you why you would want to be reading. There are some instrumental reasons, things people say, like it lowers your heart rate or increases your empathy or something, but I feel like those are by-products and not the actual reason that I want to read. In fact, I think there are quite a few reasons, so I’m just going to do one now and save some others for other weeks.
The reason I want to read more is because it makes me so happy. Happy in so many different ways.
Of course there is pure aesthetic enjoyment. The taste of the words and sentences. The excitement of a great plot. Savouring a wonderful character. Learning about things I never knew before. The sheer enjoyment of reading makes me happy all by itself. But not just that!
When I’m reading more, I have thoughts in my mind that are new and aren’t the same old thoughts that are constantly going around in my head. Nothing is as good for this as reading is, a proper long-form deep reading. It is a relief from whatever is stressing me out or preying on my mind. Reading is someone else’s voice that goes directly into your mind. It’s like it lets out the pressure valve of the inside of my head, other people can be in there with me, and then things aren’t so stale or suffocating.
The world of books is infinite. On a day-to-day basis, our lives don’t actually have necessarily that many possibilities to them. We might, in our lives, decide that we’re going to move to Argentina, but we can’t exactly do that today, mostly. But if you feel curious about Argentina, you can read a book from Argentina literally today! You can get voices from Argentina inside your mind literally today! And at the point that you get tired of that book, you can go and read about what it was like to crew a submarine in the Second World War, or about sheep farming in Shetland, or the life of Marie Antoinette. You can go absolutely anywhere instantly. It is the most joyful, freeing feeling.
Reading makes me feel connected to all of the humans who have ever written or been written about. When you read, you understand more. Even if you’re reading about people and ideas you really disagree with, when you read, you get to understand them better. And then you feel less like you are surrounded by aliens and more that the world and the people around you are comprehensible.
I think the more you read, the less egocentric you get? That might not be true for everyone, but I think there is something about it that is true for me. You begin to see that there are so many books you could never, ever have written, and you just feel tremendously grateful to the people who did write them.
I remember when I started to have a smartphone, having this feeling of looking at my bookshelves with longing and really missing them. That’s a feeling that I try to keep well at the front of my mind. I don’t like constantly scrolling and checking and seeing if something has happened with any of my internet. I like sinking into other voices and other places. It is that that makes me feel less alone. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re finding our happiness and prioritising it over making a few extra pennies for some technology billionaires. We’re focusing on what makes us happy.
wait, what’s this?
If all this is news to you, look here at last week’s post which has the general plan. We’re doing an eight-week ‘couch to 5k’ for reading training programme which I have made up. It’s an experiment, I really want to hear how it works for you! If you’re just starting, go and look at this post to get an idea of what these different ‘tracks’ are and what we’re doing. You are absolutely not behind. You can start with the first week right now. You can leave comments on that post. Or if you really want to, you can dive into this week’s program, but I really suggest just starting at the beginning. This isn’t a race.
I would love to hear how it’s gone for everyone. If you’re a paid subscriber you can comment on this post and also come and talk on my chat. If you’re following along but can’t be a paid subscriber now, everyone can keep on chatting in the comments on the first post in the series. Please do report back on what you found easy, what you found difficult, what was unexpectedly joyful, what precisely you’ve read, if there’s anything you’ve stalled on or bailed on… how you did with the film exercise?
A reminder:
‘Daily’ means most days of the week — aim for every day but at the same time let’s not stress about it if you miss a day here or there. If you bloody love and are motivated by a streak, have at it, but I am suspicious of it. I feel that there is a quality of falling off the wagon where missing one day and feeling that you’ve broken your streak makes it more likely that you will miss future days or just give up completely. At least if you’re going to do streaks, give yourself the option of ‘streak repair’ by doing more over a couple of days to make up the time.
Audiobook readers - my recommendation for you is that from this week you do 1.5-2 times this amount of time and that you make sure it is protected focus time and not eg ‘while I’m driving in heavy London traffic during a heatwave’. Just give yourself the time for your focus.
week 2 - what to do today and every day this week
Track 1
Every day: read for six minutes, twice. (ie 12 minutes total). You can do it joined up as one session, or in two lots. This is a little bit more than last week. But then you’re reading 84 minutes this week in total, which is quite a good chunk!
You might have a great idea of what you want to read, but if you need some advice I think this is a great time to get into some short stories. Here is a list by brilliant Joel Snape. Just to get you started my favourite short story ever written in the world is The Unrest Cure by Saki. It is also really fun to read aloud, just to say. Here is a thing I wrote for the Guardian a while ago about Saki and about this story and how it is in fact not antisemitic. It’s a very very funny story about antisemitism. Which should give every writer the feeling that you really can write a funny story about anything. As long as you are very, very funny.
Track 2
Every day: read for 15 minutes. Ideally in one go but you can divide it up if you need to.
Plus: choose one day in the week for a longer undivided read of 30 minutes. Choose the day now. I mean, Sunday is a great day for it so if you do it today, the rest of the week is just 15 mins a day. But don’t let me tell you how your week works.
AS EVER please prioritise reading things that YOU want to read over anything I suggest. The key is that you should be drawn to it!
But I’m putting a suggestion in each of these tracks for a good read of about the right length so, you’re reading about 2.5 hours this week. You could make good headway into a PG Wodehouse and can I just recommend Mike and Psmith? It is funny and charming, an early Wodehouse and not a Jeeves and Wooster or a Blanding’s castle one. It is set in an English boarding school. Mike is normal and Psmith is one of those characters who turns up in English literature from time to time who can just do everything, who is effortlessly clever and superior and yet enjoyable with it. He is essentially Doctor Who or Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse has just dropped him into a classic English boarding school story. (He is really the same character as Saki’s Clovis actually, I love this character.) You can obviously see the bones of Jeeves in this character, but I love how fresh it is to see him as a schoolboy.
Additional activity: sit and listen to a whole album without doing anything else at the same time. Just listen to it. Put your phone across the room until it’s done. OK fine, you can drink some nice drink and look at some scenery at the same time. I did “listen to an album a day” in the summer last year and it was just so lush. This Bluesky thread has so many great recommendations in the comments if you fancy some fresh ideas.
Obviously I have a theory about why we’re all reading less. It’s the same theory that everyone else has which is: it’s the damn phones. So a lot of the additional activities will be practising focus and life without phones all the time.
Track 3
Every day: read for 15 minutes. The hard stuff, not the easy stuff. Whatever it is that is hard that you felt you wanted to be reading more of.
Plus: choose two days in the week for two longer reads: 30 & 45 minutes. My suggestion is to plan what days those will be for you now, and think about when. That might not work for your life, it’s just a suggestion. But it might be a nice habit to be in.
Reading recommendation: listen, this week you could easily read Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and then you will have engaged with a piece of classic analysis and a foundation of understanding the modern world. Not a bad achievement for the week.
Additional activity: by all means do the album listening in Track 2 if you want to! But your specific in-addition activity is: re-reading. Re-read something this week. Could be a single page of your hard book, reading it over a few times until you get what it’s on about or just to savour the words. Could be a book you loved as a young person. I do think that the first read of any truly good book is just clearing the ground for the other reads that are to come. Books reveal themselves to us when we read them again and again, and start to make them part of us.
important final thought
REMEMBER FRIENDS: there is no wagon, you cannot fall off it, what we are practising is starting again. If you started last week and then forgot about it, you can just start again. There are thousands of very clever people trying to get us addicted to phones and thus far no laws to protect us so of course it’s going to be difficult. But we keep going. We are learning how to do ‘rupture and repair’ with our relationship with reading so every time you forget a day is an opportunity to practice coming back to it without self-recrimination and self-attack. Just go and read for 10 minutes right now.
As a thank-you to paid subscribers who are paying me to work on this for everyone… under the line: more suggestions for reading including some shorter books and some really gripping ones. The book that made me miss three stops on the Tube! A ghost story that gets scarier the more often you read it. A science fiction story which… if you like me, I think you’ll like this story A classic literary novella with the set up of a thriller!
If you liked this post do give it a like, it helps other people find it. I send out a letter about something that’s interesting me most Sundays, I am wilfully unpredictable but this post will give a sense of what I’m like. Fundamentally, I am in favour of thinking. I know.
