first of all, my goodness this has gone a bit bananas?
and then I did an hour-long phone-in with Call You and Yours
and now other papers (and other places) are in touch including Corriere della Sera in Italy!
I have turned down more press than I’ve done because I can’t do it all… but like… watch this space I guess?
That’s enough press. Now back to reading.
I have, of course, been following along with the reading program myself, sometimes falling off a bit, but then picking myself up and carrying on just like I tell everybody here to do. And just in the past week, I have really started to feel the psychological/cognitive benefits very intensely, so I thought I would record what is happening.
It’s basically this: my mind feels more my own. It happened after last week’s live 45-minute reading session. I had already read for about an hour that day. I’m reading a friend’s new book, which I was desperate to get to the end of. And then settled in with a new book in the live reading. It’s funny because when I set the time as 45 minutes of live reading, I felt a little bit trepidatious, as if it was a lot to ask of myself and other people1.
But something evidently happens for me between 35 minutes of reading and 45 minutes of reading in one go. When I finished that evening, I suddenly felt that I had a lot more choice about what I was going to do that evening and was working from more sensible and less twitchy parts of my brain. I’m not going to get into questions about dopamine and other brain hormones because I am no expert in it at all2. But as a novelist, I am self-trained to pay close attention to my internal states. And what I can say is that after 45 minutes of reading without checking my phone or doing anything else3 it felt very simple to say things to myself like, “Hold on, no, of course don’t go online right now. It’s bedtime.” Or to quietly pay attention to how my body was feeling and do a couple of stretches to ease out my muscles. Or to think carefully about what the week ahead holds and make a few quick notes. My mind felt more still and peaceful. It didn’t feel that I was having to force my attention towards my true goals and interests.
What I’m saying is that it’s taken four weeks, and I haven’t been perfect every day, but at the halfway point, I started having my first experiences of the compulsive internet feeling less compulsive for me. Which is really quite bloody exciting.
The same seems to be happening for quite a lot of people. Let us take a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come - and how much we’ve discovered - by looking at comments from people who are reading along. I am THRILLED by the response to this programme and I wanted to pull out some themes that are appearing in the comments. Thank you to every single person who posts a comment - you are helping us all get better (I sort of mean that in almost a medical sense) and feel accompanied in this journey.
a lot of people are feeling ashamed, so we can all just stop
Here are some comments people have left about their feelings of shame around not being able to read as much as they used to and how that just feels like their identity has been eroded.
“I have an English literature degree and feel so ashamed of the fact that I barely read anymore.” — Jasper
“I find it mad how I, a person who LOVES reading and teaches English Literature, can be distracted by my phone when trying to read.” — Amy
“I absolutely shouldn’t need it, because I’m a retired lecturer in Eng Lit and I’ve spent a lifetime reading, talking about, teaching and writing about books.” — Rob
“I’ve been really shocked lately to realise I can’t watch a film without double screening. It’s my shameful secret - or it was 😂” — Susan
So can we just say that I am an award-winning best-selling literary novelist, and I also have these feelings and this problem? It’s not us. There is no defense against it. Whatever we thought would help, in terms of our character or our intellect, doesn’t help. It is just like any other somewhat compulsive thing that you get suckered into using. They suckered us into being addicted to our smart phones, and they made it almost impossible to get rid of them by, for example, putting all the parking payment apps only on the smartphone.
We have to reclassify reading in our minds from something that we just naturally constantly want to do for entertainment to a wonderful, health-giving thing, like making a lovely soup and eating it4. Deliciousness, yes, but also goodness.
I am thinking a lot about what we do at the end of the eight weeks because I think all of us are going to need this peer support and encouragement ongoingly. We need something that doesn’t demand that we announce every book that we read or keep a checklist. But just celebrate when we are spending whatever amount of time we need to feel mentally healthy every day or every week reading. I don’t necessarily want this Substack to be 100% reading challenges and reports all the time, but at the same time I feel like maybe I need to have something at the top of the newsletter every week about this? Would love to know what you think.
we do actually know what the issue is: the phones encourage fragmented attention
“I wonder if our biggest reading problem isn’t that we’ve stopped loving books, but that we’ve become uncomfortable with uninterrupted attention. Maybe rebuilding a reading habit is really rebuilding our relationship with our own minds.” — Tyler
“One of the most disturbing things I’ve experienced in recent years is rereading something I read years ago and remembering things I picked up on reading it then, but not actually picking up on them… We’ve created a world like the equalizing distractions for the smart people in Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ without even trying.” — Understanderson
“this is an issue of fragmented attention, in my case, that needs to relearn focus—and possibly to balance all the input with some output, to offset curiosity with creativity.” — Anastasia
I think it’s so true that what reading involves is, in the end, a relationship to your own mind. The meaning of a book takes place between the text and the mind of the reader. The stupid phones have trained us to be always looking for whatever the next thing is, never sinking into whatever experience we are actually having. It’s also incredibly true that perhaps smart people are even more susceptible to it, or at least that being a clever person is no protection, whatever, because the infinite internet can always keep up with however much your mind can take in.
it gets easier as soon as you cross the threshold, even for five minutes
“I find 5 pages is how many broadly it takes for my mind to stop being jumpy and settle in.” — Christine
“once I sink in I don’t want to put it down, but the discipline of committing not to pick up my phone really helps.” — Flora
“I started with ten minutes in one go, and each time I’ve read for longer than that so far.” — Sasha
This is so hopeful. It’s not a physical addiction. We don’t have to go through withdrawal. Our body won’t keep craving the phone. We just need social norms and companionship to encourage us to do those first few minutes. Five or ten minutes is enough, and five or ten minutes will always be enough to start feeling engaged with a book and not with the phone.
exactly what I’m finding: there is a spillover effect where you feel less anxious and more sane in the rest of your life
“Something about reading regularly quiets my mind. Yesterday I had to go several places in succession and I noticed I just went from one to the next without checking my phone in between.” — Flora
“I’m engaging with life with a little bit more curiosity, and a little bit less rage and stress.” — Rose
“I am finding the ten (or more) minutes in the morning a very grounding exercise. Almost like going for a run or meditating.” — Sara
“I just keep going with my little bits of reading. It is becoming a sanctuary.” — Jo
Honestly, I feel so honoured to be part of this because all I’m doing is helping people get back to the person they were and introducing them to the pleasures of reading books (for the most part) not written by me! I am finding exactly these effects: that my mind is more quiet, I feel less rage and less stress. I also find that it’s like meditating and a sanctuary in my life.
God, imagine that this is what the technology billionaires have stripped from us to make their little scraps of money from each of us. I mean, really, they are strip-mining human sanity.
I am really grateful to every single reader who is on this journey with me, because sharing your experiences is making me realize how important this is. It’s not just an optional extra, a nice to have. It is the foundation of the ability to live the life we want.
a two-question interview with Henry Eliot of Read the Classics
If you are asking yourself where to go at the end of these eight weeks, Read the Classics is a great thing you should consider. Henry does marvellous guided read-alongs of classic literature, and so you’ll be reading in interested and erudite company. he also has brilliant taste in books, and basically every single thing he’s recommended for a read-a-long is something where I’ve thought either, “Oh yes, I’d love to read that,” or “Oh yes, that is a wonderful book.”
What is a good reason to read more?
Reading is a unique pleasure: it is both enjoyable in itself and it enriches the rest of your life. When we read a good novel, for example, we get the entertainment of a good story, the satisfaction of a well-turned sentence, the wisdom of psychological insight, the challenge of emotional ambiguity, the reassurance of familiar sensations well expressed, the empathy of inhabiting another’s point of view, the permission to imagine other worlds. These experiences persist beyond the last page and enlarge our knowledge and understanding of what it means to be human – and of what we ourselves are capable. There is the intimate pleasure of joining a community of other readers, with whom we now share a private knowledge and common experience. As Virginia Woolf said of one of her favourite authors: ‘Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are the salt of the Earth’. And there is the unique satisfaction of experiencing a creative work through creative work, because reading is always a creative act. When we read we weave a web of connections: to other points in the text, to other books, to the details of our own lives. Every reading and rereading is unique, because no one has brought the same experiences to that book at that time. It might be possible to live without reading, but life is undoubtedly richer and more colourful the more we read.
How do you decide what to read next?
I am lucky enough to read for work, as well as for pleasure, so I usually have three or four books on the go at once. In fact, I need to schedule my reading, so I nearly always know what I’m going to read next, weeks or sometimes months in advance. For the monthly classics book club I run through Substack (Read the Classics) I choose the books up to a year in advance. When choosing, my only criteria are that they need to be ‘classics’ (and we interpret that term loosely) and short enough to read comfortably in a month. I begin by thinking about any major anniversaries coming up, then I fill in the gaps, aiming for variety – of authors, subjects, styles, time periods, countries and original languages. I also try to arrange loose thematic connections every three months. The only time I read ‘freestyle’ is on holiday. My reading-for-pleasure pile builds up over the year and then I love choosing a stack to take with me on vacation: again, variety is what I aim for, a smorgasbord of styles and reading experiences. I’m actually on holiday as I write this; I’ve brought some Brautigan, Borges and Coetzee, as well as two wild cards: Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piñol and The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin.
“Reading is always a creative act”. YES, YES YES YES. This is why two different readers can have such different reactions to a book. This is why you can revisit the same book at different points in your life and find that it reads almost as a different work. It’s because you yourself are involved in co-creating the reading experience with the writer. I love all the things that Henry has identified here as the fruit of reading a good novel: from entertainment to a deep wisdom and challenge to our worldview. You can read whatever you want, and whichever of these feelings you’re in the mood for is OK.
half a mo, reading program, what’s this?
If you don’t know what this is about, 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.
You are NEVER BEHIND. The world of books is always waiting for you, and the comments on week one are always open as are my chat threads . If you’ve tried and then forgot about it for a few days, just go back to 10 minutes of reading a day and then see how fast you feel you can ramp up.
week 6 - 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, also a brilliant person on Metafilter has done a very pretty one with boxes to fill in
Track 1
Every day: every day this week, you’re reading for 25 minutes: either do it as one 10-minute session and one 15-minute session later on in the day, or you can do it in one go. That’s three hours across the week. And you’ll be doing the same as this next week. If you want to step it up a bit next week by saying to yourself that you will try to do more of the sessions in one go, that’s fine. Also, you are fine just continuing to do it split in two. You’re basically nearly there.
Let’s recommend you a very classic short book that you can definitely get finished this week: Chess by Stefan Zweig. It’s about how a person can become obsessed with a game, how obsession can save you but also your obsessions that kept you alive, can later on be the things that damage and endanger you. It’s really, really good.
Track 2
Every day: you’re reading 25 minutes every day, either as a 10-minute session and a 15-minute session or in one go. If you want to work on your focus, try to have at least some of the sessions this week in one go.
Plus: exciting: two longer reads:
One of 35 minutes, which is just a bit longer than your normal session
One session at some point this week of one hour. This is your first hour-long read. Enjoy it! Plan in a nice time for it. Maybe go to a library to read in the company of others, or a very lovely cafe during a time when they’re not too busy, or if the weather is up for it loll in the park. Or just go to bed an hour earlier and lie there luxuriously with your book. Just writing that makes me wish I were doing that right now.
(I am going to try to do an hour-long live silent-reading-together online later in the week but don’t know exactly when yet. I might send out a very quick email just to say the time when I’ve figured it out.)
You’re reading four and a half hours this week, which is plenty long enough to finish a good novel. May I commend unto you the wonderful novel “Loved and Missed” by Susie Boyt? It is a very tender novel with deep introspection and brilliant insight into character, in the vein of Colm Toibin or, indeed, Henry James. It is about what sounds like quite a lurid subject but is done in the least lurid way you can imagine. It’s the story of a grandmother who ends up raising her granddaughter because her daughter, the baby’s mother, is… well, look, it is a question in the first couple of chapters what is going on with the baby’s mother, so let me just say that she is in real trouble and the grandmother cannot fix it. I don’t think I’ve ever cared so much about characters in a novel, I just love them and want them to be alright. Susie is such a funny writer about such difficult subjects with warmth and humanity. I really laughed when reading it! The novel has this amazing uplifting sense to it: however wrong things go, it’s possible for them to be made into something that is okay.
Additional activity: find an object and stare at it for 25 minutes without doing anything else. Well, you can draw it if you like. You could go to a museum or gallery and look at an amazing object with a whole rich history to it. Or you could, and in some ways I think this would probably be more rewarding, pick an object that you see every day in your house and which you think is beautiful, which you put in your house because it is beautiful. Give yourself 25 minutes to absolutely look at it, to go through that familiarity right through to the other side, where you can suddenly see it again. Feast on your life, as they say.
Track 3
Every day: read for 45 minutes every day. If that feels daunting: it’s 15 minutes when you wake up, 15 minutes at lunch and 15 minutes before bed.
Plus: plan in three longer reads: an extra 45 minutes (i.e., that day you’ll read 90 minutes in total): 60 minutes and 90 minutes. I think that’s two weekend reads, and one extra 45-minute one in the evening. But of course, however you arrange it is great.
That’s your first 90-minute read, and this week you will be reading about 8.5 hours in total. I don’t know about you, but that feels muscular in terms of quantity to me. You could finish a couple of short novels, or you could make headway with a long novel project plus also have something else shorter and contrasting on the go.
If you want the contrast with a longer book, very much consider Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, oh, it is an extraordinary wonder. A journey around imaginary cities, describing their sometimes impossible architecture or the ways of life there. God, I would love to be able to write like this. I think it would be the perfect palate cleanser book this week between something longer and heavier. It is airy, but not trivial.
And in addition: I have a couple of things for you. First of all, please make sure you still know your poem off by heart that you learned earlier in the program. If not, learn it again, it will be easier the second time. Secondly, I just want you to make sure that you have a physical notebook next to you now when you’re reading. Could be a teeny tiny one with just a tiny little pen or pencil, but you are spending a lot of time reading now every week. You will find that thoughts and ideas come up, some of them related to the book and some of them totally unrelated, and I want you to have somewhere to put them.
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.
Under the line, to say thank you to the paid subscribers who are paying me to make this for everyone: nine books I simply could not put down. Really. A book that made me stop work to take it to the loo in my office to read a few sneaky pages (when I was office-working). The book that I stopped reading only when I fell asleep and then grabbed it before I even opened my eyes in the morning. The book that (fair warning) made me very rudely antisocial on a weekend away with friends. The newly-published book that has been unputdownable for me this week.
I find this list a bit revealing about me and my tastes and what really really floats my boat as opposed to the many things that I enjoy and appreciate and admire. Stuff that absolutely gets its hooks into me. I think next week I will write about this - the way reading makes you accept who you are.
nine books I simply could not put down
because it is OK to need a book to do this for you sometimes, this is one of the jobs of a writer, to be compulsively page-turning and leave you at the end with a whoosh of excitement and exhilaration
This is the book which I genuinely read all evening until I fell asleep reading it, and then in the morning, when I woke up, my hand reached for the book before my eyes had opened. If you’ve seen the film or watched the TV show, you still haven’t read the book. A lot of what is great about it is the incredibly propulsive and compelling narrative voice. It’s also immensely sexy, of course, one has to admit that. And when you step back for a moment from the complete ubiquity of this novel at a certain point in the 90s or 2000s, just have a think about what a brilliant concept it is. A journalist interviews a vampire about his long life. They sit together one long, strange night, through the night, as the vampire tells his story. It’s just a deeply spooky and compelling premise for a book. There are loads of books in this series, but none of them are as good as this one.
Yet another absolute classic of being a page-turner. I read this very suitably on a weekend away with some old university friends and was incredibly rude and ignored them and refused to go to the pub one evening because I was enjoying this book so much. The first half of the book is as propulsive as any novel in existence. It is just incredibly gripping from the first page. I tend to feel that it falls apart a bit in the second half. Of course, as it is modelled on a Greek tragedy, the whole point is that things fall to pieces in the second half, but my God, as a whole, what an achievement
I still remember sitting in work one hot afternoon with this book, still in the Books Etc (ah, remember?) bag next to my desk. Just itching to turn away from the computer and pick it up and read some more. I’d bought it and started and then could not wait to get back to it. the hook is a really good one - and I think that is something that perhaps unites all of the books on this list: the hook creates such intense, itching, insane curiosity that I have to find out what happens. The hook here is: A man has just had a break-up which he does not understand, and so he goes to seek out his previous girlfriends to try to get them to explain to him why their relationships didn’t work out. “Why did we break up?” is a question as intense in life as “Who murdered that person?” and one that more of us have to deal with. Perhaps all of us have one relationship that we look back on and don’t really understand why it fell apart.
There is no anti-memetics division
This is a book for people who like science fiction. I have a calibration for you: if you loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey and said “I never liked any science fiction before this,” then this book is not for you. However, if you loved The X-Files, this book is so for you that I want to come round to your house, press it into your hands, and sit there whilst you read the first few pages until you discover that you simply cannot put it down because it’s so bloody good. It’s about a department, kind of like in The X-Files, looking after science-fictional goings-on in the real world, except what they look after is: creatures that can make you forget that they exist. How do you run a department like that? And if your department was slowly shrinking, more and more of the people who used to be in it simply… forgotten, how would you even know?
This book is like a strange and wonderful dream, and of course it has won prizes and been much discussed. I read it a few weeks after it was published, on one beautiful dreamlike day, and then wanted to go back and read it again immediately. I describe it as a children’s book for grown-ups, which is to say like the best children’s books it has an adventure and a mystery, but also is about some quite grown-up themes. It’s like walking into a painting by M.C. Escher, if you ever dreamed of doing that as a young person. (It would be such a good combination with the current Escher exhibition in London actually.)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
I have read this book so many times that it is quite hard now for me to even imagine what it would be like to read it for the first time, but honestly, it is wonderful. Very funny of course. It’s really intelligent. The plot actually does make sense, but you will not be able to follow it at all the first time. You will just have to enjoy the book as a series of vignettes, which subsequently you can try to make sense of. I think it is better than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s less cartoonish and has some quite serious adult emotions and thoughts about why people don’t do the things they say they’re going to do in amongst a brilliant science fiction romp. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, a very deep appreciation of the music of Bach. I think I must have read it at least fifty times.
There is no writer on earth whose new novel I go to with greater excitement than Laurent Binet. Every book is different, and each one is funny and thrilling. He wrote HHhH, which was a very daring history about the assassination of the most senior Nazi ever to be assassinated (read that too although of course it is grim). This novel is a real novel of ideas: the idea is: what would the world be like if, instead of Europe invading South America, the Incas had invaded Europe? How might that have possibly happened, and what would have happened then? If that idea excites you, you must drop everything and read this at once.
This is like sitting in on other people’s therapy sessions, which honestly could be a more enjoyable thing to do? It is short essays, each one of which will give you a real punch of understanding and insight into other humans. One wants to sit and savour each one, but the first read-through, you can’t help just gulping them down. It’s the best and highest kind of gossip.
I have literally just read it this week and could not have loved it more. It is a novel that is also a graphic novel. Some pages are pure text and some are illustrated. This combination works incredibly effectively, particularly because some of the characters work in film and photography, and a lot of the themes are about what being beautiful is, so the visual is very important. The hook is that two couples in their early 40s decide to move in together to a rectory - the wreck - which one couple bought, hoping to bring children home there, but the children never happened. It is very deep about relationships, about friendship, about why we choose the friends we do and how somehow important it is to us that our friends stick to their lane, or that we should never have to accept that we might have more power in that relationship than we might have thought. It’s about self-deception, I think. Just writing this has reminded me of the wonderful Ruth Rendell novel, A Fatal Inversion, which is also about friends living together and it going quite horribly wrong, but I have really run out of space now. Just take that as an extra recommendation.
in a sense, maybe it was because my back started to feel a bit stiff from sitting in one position, so I could be watched reading for 45 minutes. Really must think about that.
My understanding is that actually nobody knows enough about brain hormones to say with the confidence that people sometimes say, “Oh, you reset your dopamine system.”
apart from shifting position and having a little drink of water
actually, I think it would be a useful note for publishers to understand that over the past 20 years they have gone from selling something that is entertaining and informative to selling something that they can legitimately feel is good for you.
I have also noticed a difference this week, and my reading hasn’t been wholly consistent. But I have got more calm and focussed when I am reading, and that’s made me feel more that way afterwards. I even spent the whole evening the other night reading when home alone, latterly with some classical music on in the background. Something I would NEVER have done usually when by myself. I’d have put the tv on and skipped from one thing to another to feel I had more obvious company, but it was such a great evening and it made me very happy. And calm. And! yesterday I decided to take myself off to the theatre. I got a cheap ticket and again had a fab evening on my own. Perhaps this is making me feel more bravely calm or quiet? Hard to put into words. You accomplish so much more doing one thing at a time. Book recommendation which seems very relevant: Patrick Brinkley’s “All the Beauty in the World” about life as a museum guard in the Met, NYC.
Finished the Julian Barnes (reluctantly- does anybody else put off reading the last few pages because they don’t want to leave?). I’m doing something similar with the Han Kang.
Bedtime read is a beautiful edition of The Code of the Woosters, and I found Logocomix in one of my bookcases! So that’s today’s 90 minute read.