Try This At Home
How I found more pleasure in reading!
It was (a bit of a) prolonged break up, but I have not used StoryGraph for several weeks now. To be clear, I used it religiously for two years and it was the only thing that helped me become more practiced as a reader, push myself to do it more, and (my favourite) keep track of things on my TBR as well as spy on what my friends were reading. This year, though, I felt able (and excited) to graduate from the line-go-up style of intellectual pleasure, feeling (for the first time in years) an organic drive to get off my damn phone and pick up a book. I no longer feel daunted by long texts; I feel excited. When I wake up in the morning, my mind itches to pick up a book, usually foregoing the desire to check social media at all.
I know it’s early days (it’s barely mid way into February as I write this, so it’s been only about two months of this kind of reading practice) but I’ve decided I am going to add to the host of posts about reading on this website to tell you a bit more about how I’ve experienced this shift, and, most importantly, (in a separate post; subscribe!) tell you about the books I have read and am reading.
How it started
As I’ve said before, I felt driven to get off my phone in its entirety in early December. After Twitter and Instagram, StoryGraph became a natural successor, and I started to feel bored of the obsessive tracking it facilitated — something that had ultimately been my saving grace at one point. I have long insisted that treating pleasure and intellectual consumption like homework is bad, but it’s not as bad as abandoning it altogether. And so I persisted. I used to obsessively track my reading patterns (it just tickles my brain in the right way, and now I’ve moved on to making copious amounts of spreadsheets at work for (largely) no reason), enter how many pages I’d read every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, race myself to beat a previous month’s or week’s targets, set myself a reading goal and let it dictate (at least in part) what I read. I knew this was far from ideal, but I enjoyed it, and it served its purpose.
But with my increasing resentment of anything digital, and my newly rediscovered love for pen and paper and the sunset and touching grass, I became excited to try a different way. Spurred on by
and , I bought a cute little notebook, and I deleted StoryGraph off my phone.How it’s going
I am unsure of how many books I’ve read this year so far (I’d have to check the little list in the back of my notebook), but I have relished them. Genuinely. Even the one(s?) I didn’t love as much as the others felt so much more pleasurable. I hit pause on a couple of ones I’d been reading, feeling no guilt about the “wasted” time spent on them. I will read Lolita at another time in my life; I left my copy in India and got a childish excitement from it. I will read A Body Made of Glass some other time too; I was simply feeling a different vibe.
How to make it
Embrace the epub
As part of the Jameson Reading Group, of which I’ve been a less than diligent attendee, I also began reading books and their excerpts digitally. Fucking gamechanger, honestly. I never got around to PDFs as such because they felt too unwieldy, but when I looked for an epub of A Singular Modernity for the group’s first session, I became hooked. Since then, I’ve read two more books in full in this format, and I’ve adored it.
This is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to read so much — when I wake up itching to read, I don’t need to get up, reach over, turn the light on. I simply duck back under the covers and pick up where I left off on my phone. It gives you a progress % so I haven’t fully eliminated my line-goes-up instinct, but that’s fine.
Embrace piracy
Functionally identical to the first thing, but I think you’re more likely to read more if you remove every possible barrier to access between yourself and the text. This includes not having to wait/look for the hardcopy of something you see mentioned online, or delaying your ability to jump into something new within seconds, if that’s what you’d like. LibGen is a lifesaver forever. If you’re not sure and don’t know who to ask, go to the Wikipedia page for LibGen which will list its active URLs. Pick one, go wild.
Touch grass (sorry)
Delete social media off your phone. I’m so serious. Even if it’s for a week, a day at a time, a day every few weeks, anything. When your hands reflexively reach for it, mind-over-matter it and force them to go for a book instead. It might feel like homework and/or crap but I genuinely believe that’s better than not getting to feel it at all, and instead just feeling the serious, real-time atrophying of your brain from the internet. I deleted both Twitter and Instagram off my phone for the majority of the past 2+ months; I now have just Instagram, but my urge to use it has already diminished as a result of my time off.
And make a list of what you read by hand. Tell your friends about stuff you recommend and annotate the hell out of everything. Take notes in a separate place. Review things you feel like reviewing, make your reviews into a little zine to share around. Godspeed.
In a small bit of writing news, my poetry manuscript Exposure was longlisted in the International Metatron Poetry Prize, which feels pretty incredible. Its title poem was recently published in Coma. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can find more links to my poetry here. xxx
