'reading is a radical act'
"Couch to 5k" for reading week 3. includes: an interview with Emma Gannon! a celebration of reading plays! and: how to memorise a poem! (if you want to)
What an incredible response the Couch to 5k for Reading is getting. I am genuinely delighted, my friends, I didn’t know there’d be so much enthusiasm for this but even more importantly than that, I didn’t realize how much it would help and how quickly. I am loving hearing from everyone, and please do continue to let me know how it’s going for you. Comments on week one continue to be open, and my chat is open if you want help or advice if you’re having a problem with a particular element. Please do come and ask, and I will try to come up with some suggestions for you.
noticeboard
a couple of quick announcements:
we did a live quiet reading session at 1.40pm-2pm on Friday. It was great! A lovely way to end the week and spend part of a lunchbreak. Let’s do it again. 1.35pm-2pm on Friday 24th July, which means it’s long enough for the longest ‘daily read’ session but you can pop in and out if you want.
did everyone know the LIFE-CHANGING SECRET of working out where your books are, which is to take photos of all your bookshelves and then use text search in your photos to look for the names of the books? (This will only work if you haven’t done the heinous thing of turning the spines to the wall of course, but I doubt any of you do that sort of nonsense.)
how do you decide what books to read?
I’ve also been asking some brilliant friends to talk about what is important to them about reading and how they pick their next book to read. I think these are actually both quite complex questions. Trying to explain last week why reading makes me so happy was a really interesting exercise, and my happiness is, of course, not the only reason that I read. There are many other reasons which I am trying to get my thoughts in order about. And when I think about how I pick the next book that I’m going to read, that seems very mysterious, almost as subconscious as working out how I pick my next book to write!
Genuinely, a book that I’ve been reading recently is the 1944 thriller by H.E. Bates, who went on to write The Darling Buds of May, called Fair Stood the Wind for France. I wasn’t aware of knowing anything about what this book was about. I just found the other day that the phrase “Fair Stood the Wind for France” was going through my head, and I went to look it up and saw that it was a book by H.E. Bates. I thought, “Gosh, yes, that is exactly what I want to read right now.” A thriller written in 1944 by Bates who was in the RAF about the crew of a plane that has to ditch in France under occupation and then try to find their way back home. Written during the war, when they didn’t know whether they were going to win or not. I find it almost unbearably moving.
My father’s uncle Henry was the navigator in a Lancaster bomber, which was the aircraft that came after the Wellington, which is what they’re flying in “Fair Stood the Wind for France”. He was shot down in a bombing raid over Magdeburg a few weeks before my father was born. My family never knew what to hope for him. A Jewish boy coming down alive in Nazi Germany might be worse than a quick death in the air. My great grandparents never knew what had happened to him, although we know now that everyone in the plane would have been killed instantly.
So this book is particularly moving for me and somehow exactly the right moment in my life for me to read it. Even weirder, I’ve been simultaneously reading a book by Simone Weil, which was written about France in exactly the same year. How did I know? I’ve spent my life in books, I suppose, and a lot of memories are stored in my brain about different books that I’m not completely aware of. The world of books is its own almost complete universe, which you can wander in and get to know, and where there are always new landscapes to explore. As I’m reading more, I find that old feeling coming back to me: “Oh no, I will never be able to read all of the books that I want to read.” But maybe it’s alright, and the world is like that too. Imagine if you could see absolutely everything before you die, and then you’d have to sit around thinking “right, I’ve seen absolutely everything”. How depressing that would be. Let us anticipate that on every day of our lives there will still be more to enjoy if we want it.
The first wonderful friend who’s given thoughts on why a person wants to read more books and on how she decides what to read next is the brilliant Emma Gannon, who is a Substack legend, of course for her newsletter The Hyphen, and whose writing always has a wonderful, enthusiastic serenity (a very difficult combination to pull off). I first met her when she interviewed me about the release of the Disobedience movie many years ago, when we were in a store room above the Everyman Hampstead cinema! She is a writer who is both prolific and thoughtful, someone who thinks a lot about creativity and whose advice is incredibly helpful about how to create a life in creative fields. She’s a serious reader and her reading recommendations are always worth taking seriously. Here are her answers to my two questions.
What is a good reason to read more?
Gosh, so many reasons. The first one that comes to mind is ‘less phone time!’ While I was in launch-mode for my latest book, I was averaging 6 hours on my phone. That made me feel sick, Naomi! Now that my book is out, I’m going back into reader-mode. I am a reader as much as a writer-- I need to read in order to write. There is extensive research showing how reading lowers our heart rate and induces a deeper state of relaxation. It’s good for us. My husband bought me a Kindle for my most recent birthday and I’m so excited at the prospect of reading whatever I want to, at any time, without needing room in my luggage. I haven’t had a Kindle for about 20 years, but for some reason it is appealing to me again, even though I will always own the physical version for my shelves if I really love a book. Another good reason is that it makes you a more empathetic human. I’ve just finished reading a memoir about grief, and I felt so close to the author, as if I’d just sat across from her at a long intimate lunch. I also love testing my attention span to see how long I can read before checking my phone or getting fidgety. Another good reason is that I strongly feel reading is a radical act, and you contribute to the book industry and bookstores when you do. In a world that wants us to watch ‘short form video’ or shitty AI, reading a good book is making a statement and keeping longform alive.
How do you decide what to read next?
I find this so difficult, especially as I’m so lucky to have a towering TBR (to be read) pile. I usually go off intrigue and mood, whatever I feel most curious about at the time. At the moment, David Sedaris has been everywhere in the press and podcasts, so I thought, OH GO ON THEN, and gobbled up his book in a day. Next, I’m going to read Villa Coco as it was recently described as a ‘charm novel’ in a newsletter, which apparently means a novel without any violence or horrible stuff in it, which I feel like I need at the moment! This is slightly out of character though, because a lot of the time I avoid overly hyped books. Recently I’ve been enjoying reading older books from the 90s which I seek out on World of Books, a second-hand website. I love the feeling of reading something that not everyone else is reading. Mainly, I just follow my intuition, and my friend’s recommendations. Also I’m not afraid to have two books on the go at the same time.
I loved Emma’s answers here. I definitely recognise the feeling that I don’t like reading something that everyone else is reading. I have never read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin because so many people were reading it at the same time when I was a teenager! Although I suppose if I read it now, it would not be what everyone else is reading.
Thank you so much Emma <3 <3 <3 - and of course her latest book is A Creative Compass, a great one to check out for gorgeous, loving thoughts on how to bring more creativity into your life and brilliant exercises including reconnecting with joy, solitude and the strange power of asking what I’d call ‘your subconscious or whatever’ for guidance… which, as with suddenly finding myself reading two books written about France in 1943 really does know a lot more than it lets into the conscious mind…
wait, what is all this?
If you don’t know what this is about, or you don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about the different tracks, go and read this post first. TLDR is that we are doing an eight-week program to get our reading fitness back, like a couch to 5K for reading.
Track one is for people who are quite time poor and would ideally be reading 20 minutes a day or thereabouts.
Track two is for people who are aware that they are spending too much time scrolling on the internet and want to grab some of that time back for reading, and they feel they would like ideally to be reading 20 to 60 minutes a day.
Track three is for people who are reading fine but are aware that they are steering themselves away from the harder material and want some encouragement to work on the tough stuff.
My advice is to start at the beginning if you haven’t started yet. You are NEVER BEHIND. The world of books is always waiting for you, and the comments on week one are always open. If you’ve tried and then forgot about it for a few days, just go back to 10 minutes of reading a day from week one. One of the things that we are really practising here is persistently getting back to it, even when the evil technology billionaires have managed to tempt us into their distraction machines for a while. Every time we do that, for just ten minutes at a time, we are winning.
Right, with that: here are this week’s assignments.
week 3 - what to do today and every day this week
remember
every day means ‘most days of the week’. Aim for every day but don’t panic if you miss one. Just do it as soon as you remember.
you are very much encouraged to do a rules-modification on any of my suggestions if you know that something else will work better for you
we have reader-designed trackers! a google doc digital one here, and a printable paper one here
Track 1
Every day: read for 15 minutes - split, or in one go. Well now we’re talking. 15 minutes a day and you really should be able to feel the difference. Are you starting to have a think about other things you’d like to read? Having a queue of books/articles/stories forming in your mind and waiting for your reading time? Has it started to feel quite different and nice compared to how you usually feel when you put the book down after 15 minutes? I hope it’s really starting to feel like quite a good treat.
If you’ve got good ideas of your own, please read those - what you are drawn to is much more important than whatever I recommend. But if you’d like an idea of a good thing you could probably finish in your hour-and-three-quarters of reading this week, how about…
I mean look, maybe this is not very Track 1 of me but on the other hand Track 1 is not about ‘having no intellectual ambitions’. My suggestion is that this week you could consider reading a play. Plays are brilliant because they are full stories. Obviously, incredibly gripping and brilliantly written, but they are short. And if you didn’t manage to see a play in the theatre when you wanted to, you can just read it and get a lot of the benefit!
My advice this week, is to read The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Perhaps especially if you have seen it performed as a play but haven’t ever read it, but in all cases I think it is a really wonderful read! The reason I say this is that the stage directions have a lot to them that you wouldn’t actually see, of course, if you just went to see the play in the theatre. Reading it is its own unique and special and absorbing literary experience. Of course it is about McCarthyism. It’s about America. It feels like it would be at least as relevant now as it has ever been when America looks once again to be in the grip of the strange religiosity that rises up in the country and is never really very far away. It’s easy to forget that America started out as a Puritan fundamentalist stronghold. It is not uniquely susceptible to the mechanisms of the witch hunt, of course, but perhaps it is most surprising when it happens in America because America’s view of itself is that it is a more rational country than this. But this isn’t just a play of ideas. It’s also a play of character and a play about society.
I have the most wonderful memory of sitting in a Barnes and Noble at Columbus Circle in New York, on a rainy October afternoon, having bought the book and just reading through the whole thing while the rain poured down outside. I just think you would have the most amazing time with it this week. And if you don’t manage to get it finished this week, you can finish it off next week!
Track 2
Every day: read for 20 minutes - you can split it up as 15 + 5 if you like, so it’s just what we were doing last week plus another five minutes at some point.
Plus: plan a time for one longer read during the week, of 45 min. Have a think about your week and figure out where it might fit in. Is there a lunch break it would go into well? Is there an evening when you know you’ll have some free time, or a weekend morning?
Now Naomi, you’re going to ask, is that longer read in addition to the 20 minute daily read or is it instead of that read? In fact, you’re going to say, I wondered this last week! And indeed I didn’t say anything about it last week because I think it was fine last week for it to be rolled into the daily reads. But I am going to give you my answer from now on which is: I think it is in addition.
I want the daily read to be an anchor habit for you, something you know is coming up every day. And I want the longer read to be a special occasion.
Put it this way: 15 mins reading on the morning commute plus 5 minutes at lunch (or whatever) is very hard to turn into 45 minutes of solid reading. And I would just really love you to have that 45-minute experience. One evening when you just put down the phone and go “ooh good, it’s my book night tonight” or a weekend morning lolling in bed with a book, or a lovely treat of a planned lunchbreak with a packed salad and a book. So we’re practising two different reading modes really: a little bit a day, and also a nice long stint.
BUT OF COURSE: I want to hear how this works for you. If in fact this suddenly feels oppressive and awful then please tell me!
This week you’re reading for just over three hours, so that really is time to finish a short book. As ever, your own interest should lead you, but if you want a little recommendation how about A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers? This is a very calming book about a young person who becomes a tea monk, which is a sort of itinerant therapist, who meets a robot, and they have some conversations about the nature of their world and about the right way to live. There is a gentle plot. It’s at least as much about how the world could be if we decided to organize it differently as it is about detailed plotting. Because in a way, therefore, it really is quite a political book, there’s actually an episode of David Runciman’s political podcast about it which would be a great thing to listen to as an accompaniment.
Additional activity: spend 20 minutes staring at some nature. Just pick a nature and stare at it. It’s SUMMER NOW, and in the UK anyway this week it is not going to be so bastard hot you want to die. So it is time for staring at nature. Maybe you are by the seaside in which case just take 20 minutes and look at some waves. They come in, they break, there are more coming, god it’s lovely. If you are not on holiday anywhere nice, still find a tree to stare at, or sit in a park and look around, or watch some birds, or at a pinch literally get a potted plant or a flower or some grass and look at it. I guarantee there will be more there to notice after 20 minutes than there was at the start. I think we are basically built for this looking-at-nature thing, that is how our ancestors got everything done - by noticing interesting things about the natural world and then thinking about them. Incidentally, I strongly think that looking at a sleeping tiny baby counts as looking at nature. Not once they can talk. You will have to decide for yourself whether looking at your pet for 20 minutes counts1.
Track 3
Every day: read for 25 minutes a day, you can do it all in one go or broken up, as, let’s say, one 10-minute session and one 15-minute session, which makes it feel really very doable. As ever, if you’re in this track, you’re making sure that this is time is for the hard stuff, not the easy stuff.
Plus: this week plan in time for two longer reads during the week, both are forty-five minutes long. They are in addition to your regular 25-minute reading sessions, for a total of four and a half hours of reading this week or thereabouts. I reckon that’s one evening and one lunch break, or one session on the weekend. Or two weekend sessions! Just have a think about where it fits into your life. Obviously, you don’t have to have a regular longer read slot, but it might be nice to think about where it feels natural in your week. From now on, you’re always going to be having at least two longer reading sessions every week, and sometimes there will be three.
And in addition: learn a poem off by heart. My advice is to pick one that rhymes. It’s even easier if it’s a song lyric. Rhyme, meter and tune are technologies we humans invented to make memorising easier (yes).
I’m not going to tell you how long this poem should be because I don’t know how easy or how difficult you find it to learn things off by heart. What I will say is: find something that is meaningful and beautiful to you, something that you will be grateful that you have in your mind. One will never ever feel upset for the rest of one’s life to have a Shakespeare sonnet off by heart, also, it will make people very disproportionately impressed with you when you just come out with it2. If you haven’t looked at poems for a long time, do have a look at the book “The Poetry Pharmacy” or one of the spin-off books from that. It has a really wonderful conceit, which is poems to help you with different problems in life, and actually the poems are really well chosen for that.
Here’s one that I know by heart, which is quite easy to learn and which contains a lot of real wisdom, as many Robert Frost poems do:
Nothing Gold Can Stay By Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
And if you like that (or if you don’t, because you find Frost a bit portentous) you might also like Sophie Hannah’s parody version.
How to learn it off by heart? Start by reading through a few times to make sure you’ve understood it, because understanding helps with memory. Then go line by line. What is the first line? Can you get it straight? Can you find the second line? Say the two of them together. Notice the rhyme and the rhythm and how the words fit. If necessary, repeat it fifty times. Once you feel sure of that, go to the third line. You’ve got the whole week to work on it. Remember that spaced repetition really helps. If you’ve learned it in one go over the course of an hour or so, then leave it an hour and come back and do it again. Once you have it perfect again, then leave it two hours. Then leave it four hours and go again from the beginning. The first few times might feel torturous and may feel like it’s not going in, but each spaced repetition makes it easier the next time.
Why are we doing this? Because I think it’s probably really, really good for our brains and our focus, and because it is wonderful to have poems in your mind that you can come back to at moments of distress or even boredom.
And if you fancy a recommendation of a Hard Read for this week, how about the Oresteia? The only three-play grouping we have that survives from Ancient Athens, it’s about revenge, the limits of love or filial piety and - in the end - about how a community and a democracy can decide what is just perhaps better than an individual.
Under the line - more wonderful plays to consider reading this week (I think I might theme my recs every week?! Unless I decide not to) including: a modern version of an Ancient Greek play that reveals things you never thought about before in a well-known story, a play that speaks to our time more than any other, and a very very charming play about competitive tree-climbing! Do let me know if you read any of these, I will love to hear about it.
