reading and how to do more of it
or: how to be enjoyably well-educated, an occasional series in which I get very pissed off about an AI-written article
This is part 3 of what is turning into a massively long set of thoughts about what I do to try to make myself into what an AI-generated post promised, a “disgustingly educated person”. I got so annoyed by this post and its low expectations for the human mind that I started writing and haven’t stopped yet. I just cannot tell you for example how filled with fury it makes me that there are now TWO illustrations on this post showing glasses resting the WRONG WAY UP on a book. You will scratch the lenses! It’s like the AI is laughing at us.
Part 3 is about ‘reading books’ which is obviously a subject on which I could write 100,000 words, so please treat this as just ‘some extracted jottings’.
It is of course a vital question for right now. The world is full of articles like this one (you can read it for free if you sign up to the website), about how students are turning up at university unable to read. This isn’t caused by laziness, the author says: “When a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.”
It is a crisis and those of us who are over 22 can’t help if we are also succumbing to the not-reading epidemic. Genuinely almost everyone I know, including very serious novelists and intellectuals, have experienced this problem at least a bit in the past few years. All of us have had to do some work reminding ourselves that ‘oh yes I do like reading’.
The truth is that so many of us are now addicted1 to our phones. We started before we knew that they were addictive. Otherwise, we would have been much more on our guard.
It was the pandemic that made it particularly bad. We were so starved for company and glued to the news and trapped at home and we got addicted to our smartphones.
There is actually quite an interesting parallel with cigarettes, in which it was the trenches of World War One that got millions of people addicted to them. Tobacco use had been around for a long time but broadly it was seen as a luxury to be done occasionally (fine cigar after dinner) and very low class to be using tobacco all the time in the form of cigarettes. But in World War One, men in the trenches used cheap mass-market cigarettes to steady their nerves. A widely available crutch plus a massive crisis affecting everyone in different ways, and hey presto, you have tens of millions of addicts.
This is a real problem about which we need to be very honest and human with each other. We are the generation who didn’t know, just like the WWI generation didn’t know about cigarettes. We need to be real with each other about how hard it is, and how we’re helping ourselves, what’s working and what’s not.
So it feels like a particularly shocking thing for someone to use AI to give crap generic advice about. This post - and the ones that accompany it - are not generic advice, they are my real thoughts. I do think we need to take this quite seriously and that AI platitudes are likely to make things worse rather than better.
Here is part 1 of my fury with this AI article:
and here is part 2:
And here is my sort-of philosophy of ‘self-education’, which is about why I love this. Which is not because I think it has a lot of status but because it FEELS REALLY NICE and is basically pretty much (sorry) THE ACTUAL MEANING OF LIFE.
so: learning by reading books
This is what the AI post says: “Read, But Like, Actually Read. Read books. Real ones. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir. Read across genres. If you only read productivity books and self-help, I’m worried about you. Read a romance novel. A war memoir. A book on mushrooms. Let your brain become a house with many rooms. And here’s a dirty secret: you don’t have to finish every book. Life is too short for boring chapters.”
Obviously this has the same problem as all AI-written things which is that it is incredibly generic. It has no personal taste, because it has no person behind it. It is a bunch of platitudes. Which book about mushrooms?! The Mushroom At the End of the World? The Mushroom Murders? Annihilation? The Kew book on the Magic of Mushrooms? The Girl with All the Gifts? (Yes those are all great, enjoy them all. I once went on a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall mushrooming day, you know.) A real person would never write this list this way because they would have specific things to press on you not a weird generic list. Ugh, I don’t just want to read any romance novel, I want to read something that you have read and are excited to tell me about.
It also doesn’t grapple with the actual problems of reading - the reasons that people aren’t reading, and what it feels like to try to get reading seriously again if you haven’t for a while. ALSO, there is a critical question of how to choose which books to read. Because I’m afraid that while many books are great, some books are really utter rubbish. It has been ever thus. There is a situation where if you read a book and it’s bad/boring/annoying/incomprehensible it can actively stop you reading for weeks. This has happened to me. Not just if I insisted on reading right through to the end if I wasn’t enjoying it.
So here are some of the things I know about how to read.
how to choose which books to read
Read at whim. This idea is from this wonderful book: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. It is different to “all reading is great” - not all of it is great but you can helpfully use your intuition to work out what you want to read next. If you want a first book to kickstart a reading habit, that book itself is a lovely place to start. Wander around a bookshop (or better, a library) and see what attracts you. Or just pick something at whim from your TBR pile. He’s very against reading according to a ‘plan’, and I understand why, it can suck the joy out of the whole thing.
But I think this is easier if you already have a well-cultivated erm ‘mind-garden’ - if you have tons of ideas about what books to read then you’re doing well and don’t need help. But if you’re just going “oh yeah, I used to have that” or “I see people have that, but how do they get it?” then the question of how to decide what to read is really quite crucial. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while. “Knowing which are the good books” or actually “knowing which are the good books for me” is a skill like any other and you need to put some time and thought into developing it.
There is a question about whether you should be choosing very easy books or harder ones and - can I just really suggest that you pay strong internal attention to what is happening when you’re actually reading the book? If you are drawn to go on, then that is the right book for you. If you’re feeling bored, try a different one. But also see below (“to keep reading”) on what to do when your mind wanders which is a different thing to ‘feeling bored’. I think that “just read a few thrillers” is to reading advice what “just take a hot bath” is to destressing advice. Taking a hot bath is really lovely, thrillers are great. But a hot bath isn’t right for everyone, and not everyone likes a thriller. And sometimes when you’re stressed you need to eg exercise or write an angry letter and not send it, ie you need something more active. To get yourself reading what you need is not the most simple thing but the thing that is most enticing to you which holds your attention. It might be a simple unchallenging book! I have just personally found that basically the advice to try simple unchallenging books mostly doesn’t work for me when I’m in a reading slump, it just makes it worse. I often need something short but with a lot to it. Here are a few recommendations:
if you fancy non-fiction, Janet Malcolm books are brilliantly short, and filled with good stuff.
please please do not discount short stories. They are out of vogue right now but they are SUCH a good way to sample a wide range of writers and styles and get a sense of what kind of thing you like. Scrolling down this list on Reddit I thought, yup, a person could read one of these a day for a month and end up really having a good sense of what kind of thing they want to pursue more of.
reading a great play is often excellent. You can read The Crucible in a couple of hours, and then you’ve understood one of the great works of literature.
To find older books that might appeal to you, think about previous books you’ve liked and what they had in common, and how you found them. Follow people who seem to like the same books you like. A fun trick is to google the names of three books you love “in quote marks like this” and see if anyone else is talking about specifically those three, because chances are you might enjoy the rest of their taste.
I know this might be very obvious but: to find new books, read book reviews. There are still a load of newspapers and magazines that do wonderful book reviews. This is a great site that aggregates book reviews.
Alan Jacobs advises against ‘reading by reading list’ which I totally understand BUT casting your eye over some reading lists, and even better finding out why those books are on those reading lists and then picking at whim from them is a very nice strategy.
Join a read-along project. These are so good! There are many on substack, one of the things that makes me love it here but also elsewhere, eg:
You can do much worse than pick a literary prize and pick from the longlists over the past many years. eg: the Women’s Prize, the Baillie Gifford (formerly Samuel Johnson Prize), the Royal Society Science Book Prize, the Booker and you know, the Pulitzer. BUT: don’t force yourself to read books that you don’t enjoy just because they’re on the list. You’re looking for an “oooh I am enticed” feeling.
Look, my real advice is: go and spend three hours in a second-hand bookshop and look for anything that takes your fancy, and allow your fancy to be taken by anything and come away with a stack of books. Put them next to a chair you like to sit in and one in the bag you carry with you. Allow yourself to experience that your life could be filled with easy moments of reading. That is how to do it. Be physically with the books.
Actually: I have been thinking that I might try to put together a “Couch to 5k” programme for reading. Please do let me know in the comments or by PM if you’d like to be involved in trying such a thing out or have ideas for it?!
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.
Below the line: my best tricks for getting yourself reading: starting, the best mental setting for reading, what to do about internal interruptions, why you might like to read a book twice, and how to find support that helps with reading difficult books without rotting your brain!
