Reading Can Be Difficult
Scene in the Montreal metro, last winter.
If our attention for long-form reading was already faltering because of texts, social media, and the delivery of online reading material to us in shorter and shorter bits, not to mention our often-frenetic lives, the pandemic drove a decisive nail into that coffin. During those difficult years of fear and isolation, I heard many people say that although they wanted to read books, they found they simply couldn't. They attributed some of this perplexing inability to an overall attention problem, but also noted that their increased level of anxiety and stress was getting in the way of their ability to relax, concentrate and forget about the outside world through a book. Paradoxically, a pastime that had once been a comfort became tortuous. They'd sit down with a book and try to read, but realize that they weren't absorbing the words in front of them. Having to repeatedly backtrack became a chore, and added to the stress. Worse, they weren't enjoying the content of the book either. With their minds already filled with a muddle of anxious, chaotic thoughts, it was hard to get into the book, and hard to lose themselves in its story or ideas. Eventually, many people gave up on long-form reading, and still haven't reclaimed the practice that once gave them so much pleasure.
And reading a book, especially reading it closely, requires focus and effort. When we spend a lot of time scrolling through short-form info, whether it's news blurbs, social media posts, Tik Tok or Instagram reels, or Twitter/X feeds, what we're doing is essentially consumptive and passive. The constantly changing texts and topics, often accompanied by images, entertain us. We take them in, on a mostly-superficial level, and quickly move on to the next. We have control over the speed of our scrolling, knowing we can always bail out of one thing because it will be followed by an endless supply of alternatives. We don't have to engage in depth with anyone, although we can if we want; we don't have to concentrate any harder than we want to. We're given an easy way to respond to things we like, whether by emojis or a simple click, and we can share those things with others. But our minds don't have to work the same way they do when we read a lengthy essay, article or book -- we're not working the way we do when we're trying to engage deeply or learn something comprehensively.
For those of us who had the kind of education where we were asked about what we read and were expected to be able to talk about it, have an opinion, and summarize the ideas or incorporate them in writing of our own, reading now can be accompanied by a self-critical internal dialogue: "I ought to be absorbing this better," "Huh, I don't remember what I just read, or what I read yesterday," "I'm not enjoying this book at all." That's not much fun. It's far easier to look at a lot of stuff that changes all the time and doesn't challenge our minds to pay close attention. And after a while, that's pretty much all we want to do...maybe even all we are able to do.
I listened to a podcast recently with a woman who now studies attention and works on developing new forms of education designed to foster students' ability to focus. She had been an English literature major, but her comeuppance arrived after she admitted to herself that she hadn't read a novel in years. Sitting down with a book of literature she had loved and written about, maybe fifteen years before, she expected to fall into the rapt spell she remembered. But she was stunned to find out that she simply could not focus, and could not read with anything close to "attention" for more than five to ten minutes. She was so alarmed and shocked -- she "had known her attention was bad" but not how bad -- that she set about to re-train herself. She set aside the same time every day, and read for a little bit longer each session. I can't remember how long she said it took her -- several weeks to a month -- but she did regain her former ability, through painstaking, deliberate effort. From that personal experience, she went on to work on attention as an educational issue, developing new curriculums for children that help them learn how to read attentively, and to absorb and enjoy long texts. Needless to say, smartphones are not allowed in those classrooms.
I'm grateful that I didn't have problems reading during the pandemic. It continued to be the pleasure and solace it's always been for me, but I did feel the isolation very keenly. When I was approached in the spring of 2020 by an online friend about reading Haruki Murakami's IQ84 together, via Zoom, I was immediately interested. We invited some other people from all over the place - I think our locations ranged from India to Arizona -- found a time of day that worked for everyone, and agreed to meet weekly. Many of the original people dropped out after a while, including the person who had invited me initially. But I continued to facilitate the group, inviting some other friends. Today we have a core of seven people who have continued to meet every week, reading and discussing long complicated books. Many of the books are works in translation, set in non-English-speaking parts of the world. I know for a fact that I would not have read or re-read as many of these books without the company and encouragement of a group of equally-committed readers. I'll put our book list at the bottom of this post for you to peruse -- and we can happily recommend any of these titles to you.
Most of us don't think of reading as a communal pastime, so much, but why is that? Yes, you still need to sit down with the book and read the pages, or listen to an audiobook version, and that is usually a solitary act -- though I have one friend who has read books aloud with her husband every night for years and years, and loves to read this way. During the pandemic, I knew of transatlantic couples who read to each other daily, via phone or zoom. I was part of several memorable online events where the participants gathered to read a novella or a play aloud, taking turns and passing the text to each other over and over again, like a baton, over a period of hours. In our group, we often read passages aloud. I suspect there is something powerful and even primal in human beings about animating the word, and hearing it out loud.
Most book groups assign one book per session, and then meet to discuss it just once, before going on to the next one. Our group is more like a seminar. We read 60-100 pages each week, discuss that portion in depth, then move on to the next section. Some people take tangents that they share with the group, such as doing research on an author, historical periods or events. Others are interested in the structure and development of the writing and where it fits in the arc of the author's work. We compare translations and even go to the original languages if one of us knows it well enough. We've astonished ourselves at the places these discussions have taken us, as well as the sheer volume of pages we've read -- it's a perfect example of how doing a large task bit by bit can lead to success. For a whole variety of reasons, this interplay of solitary reading and serious, communal discussion, within the context of friendship, has worked very well.
All of this is to say: there's hope if you've had a hard time reading books in recent years. You might try finding a partner, or a group to join -- like exercise, reading together seems to work. And you might try reading the best books you can find. By that I don't mean only books in some offical "canon" of literature, or that contemporary novels aren't worthwhile; many of them are. Do try looking at the Booker Prizes, PEN award, National Book Award shortlists, books by Nobel winners and other major award recipients. I am no fan of "best books of the 21st century" lists and their ilk; better to me are lists of writers and books from countries new to me. I've read a lot of novels, both new and famous older ones, by writers from India, Africa, Japan, Korea, South America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and Scandinavia that have opened my eyes, not only to those cultures but to different ways of working with language to tell a story. During those years when I couldn't travel, these books took me on their wings.
So don't be discouraged - you aren't alone, and you can actually get your reading chops back. The woman I described above did it a good way, sticking to a few minutes each day, and gradually increasing. We lose practice gradually, and we have to regain it gradually, so be patient. And again, I would love to hear about your own experience: are you reading as much as you used to? What makes reading challenging, and what works for you?
Our Book Group List, 2020-2024
2020
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
2666, Roberto Bolaño
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
2021
Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.
Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)
Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness
Milkman, Anna Burns
O Pioneers, Willa Cather
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2022
The Eye of the Rigal, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 3)
White Shadow, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 2)
The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 1)
How I Became a Nun, Cesar Aira
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira
Several short stories, Borges
The Reluctant Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño
Recitatif, Toni Morrison
The Birds, Aristophanes
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
2023
Pig Earth, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 1)
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert
Shared Silence, Lalla Romano
The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr
Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4)
Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk
Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk
2024
The Magic Mountain, Thoman Mann (in progress)
James, Percival Everett
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Vergese
Don Quixote, Cervantes
The Fraud, Zadie Smith
Lilac and Flag, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 3)
Once in Europa, John Berger (Into Their Labours, Vol 2)
Very interesting! I occasionally ponder over the direction that my reading habits have taken over the past 30 or so years. For me, it has probably had less to do with technology, the internet, and society, and more to do with studying to do an MA in English Lit. In the course of fast-tracking through an Hon BA and the MA, I crammed a heck of a lot of reading into a few short years, doing as many course overloads as it was possible to do. My bedside table was constantly stacked high with novels to be read through. I was a very diligent student and came to every class prepared to discuss our required readings (soon realizing that many fellow students did not). My coursework was doing in the early 1990s when deconstructionist discourse was all the rage - and perhaps still is to this day. In any case, all of that to say that, by the time I tore through dozens of novels, picking them apart, identifying literary devices, narrative techniques, etc.. I was left with very little interest in recreational reading. To this day, if I pick up a fiction novel and begin reading, I'm soon picking it to pieces. The only type of fiction I've continued to find of interest are novels that were written in such a way that they appeal to those who like to pick things apart -- I'd put Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes into that category.
So, I know that doesn't actually jive much with a discussion on being able to enjoy and focus on longer form fiction, but it does explain where I'm coming from, or where I was at before becoming an even more erratic reader. On any given day, I read through a ton of different texts, pretty much all online, and most of it to do with environmental stuff, or ecology. I guess that it might be accurate to say that a lot of my mental energy is spent online, moderating environmental or ecology groups, native plant groups, etc.. on facebook. I read complicated research papers, listen to certain speakers on video podcasts, and sometimes audio. I do read from actual books -- all non-fiction books having to do with natural history or the environment. However, I don't actually like reading on paper anymore. I do it, but I can't say I enjoy it very much as it feels *slow* to me -- I can't read from a book nearly as fast as I can read on a large computer screen. I know, this probably all sounds rather weird, especially coming from someone who spends a lot of time poking around outside in the garden, or back in my woodlot photographing birds, or hacking away at invasive weeds. But reading has become something I do to absorb and internalize information so that I can use that information to, say, battle with the provincial government for not consulting watershed intakes when they issue aerial herbicide spraying permits (that was last week's battle).
This might seem like a digression, but this morning, my brother sent me a video recording of Steve Jobs speaking at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Co. He was certainly a visionary and excellent communicator. It was interesting to hear him speaking about how we may adopt new technologies, but there's a lag that happens, when we use the technology to do what we used to do in a certain way, but that given about 5 years, we change how we will make use of that technology. He gave several examples like the switch to electric motors, and of moving from radio to television (early television was actually like radio but with moving images). Also, that computers are really sort of stupid things -- they aren't really (or weren't) all that smart, but could do operations hundreds, now thousands, of times faster than we can, but they enable us to do things at lightning speed, from anywhere, and so on. He asked how old people in the room were, and whether they were under or over 36 years old - and if you were under, you were probably growing up with computers. He asked how many had a personal computer and very few did. I actually did have one by then and began editing magazines on one by late 1984. Anyhow, just listening to Jobs got me thinking about how our ways of interacting were already beginning to change by the time of his presentation, but also how much more we would change over the next 30 years. It wasn't just the computers that changed, but how we interact with them, and how they have changed our communication (he gets into this in his talk). I realize this doesn't actually explain why many of us may find it difficult to settle down and lose ourselves within a novel, but it does help to explain how many of us have become sort of "wired in" to the whole web thing. Sometimes I think of how complicated things seem and how much multi-tasking I do in a day -- like maybe stopping to download some photos just taken of a bird and upload them into iNaturalist, then jumping to send an email, or write a comment somewhere on FB, or watch a video on forest ecology while peeling potatoes for dinner, blah blah blah. I don't know if any of the above is making much sense in explaining why it's so hard to wind down and read a book anymore. These days, if I need to get to sleep, I grab a book and read two or three pages and that knocks me right out. I suspect a lot of this has to do with something "brain" related. It's probably all kind of bad, or would be, if one didn't push away from the computer screen, grab the pruning shears and head out to the woodlot to chop down some non-native honeysuckle vines. Speaking of which, I should be getting out there -- so I'm not taking time to proofread the above --- it is what it is. :)
Thank you for this, Beth. It gave me a new perspective on the public reading of scripture at the daily office. I no longer have a community to share the readings with, but I have found reading out loud (and imagining I larger community) helps to focus my attention. I should also say that Catherine and I have a regular daily discipline of reading a novel to one another. We will take up your list!