Why do you read?

I recently heard a man say that the reason he read was that it was the rare time in a day when he felt gentleness.

I was so intrigued by this: reading not to accumulate knowledge or to see through another’s eyes or even to escape into another world, but to simply reside in a feeling.

I just started reading Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables¹ Nunez’s narrator begins the novel by reflecting on her own reading, and she quotes the opening line from a novel she read long ago: “It was an uncertain spring.”

She remembers almost nothing about the book except this line. Not the story, not the characters. But she decides that doesn’t matter.

“Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered.”

School emphasizes what you remember—and what you can critique and evaluate— because that’s what can be tested for. We’re taught to read to know about a book, but with such an emphasis, we forget that we also read a book to know ourselves. Or just experience ourselves. Reading a book can be like a meandering conversation with a good friend, a time to let our minds drift through thoughts and questions.

I’ve recently been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, and she critiques Western science because it builds its knowledge primarily through making a plant a single object of study instead of thinking of the plant as part of larger relationships and, most crucially, having something to teach us. A plant is a subject to be listened to for Kimmerer more than an object to be probed.

I like the implications of this for reading—to read not to know a book but to listen to yourself and the world around you.

I like to read with the eye of a literary critic, of course, but I think it’s important to also remember that reading can also just be an experience, like dancing, singing, driving, or cooking. There’s no reason you shouldn’t pick up a book and read just to feel gentleness, just to feel your thoughts slow.

I read poetry simply for the associations it sparks. A poem becomes more of a dreamscape than a textual place to find any pointed meaning. I like going to art museums for the same purpose: to let my mind drift, to experience myself in a different type of conversation.

The ongoing war between devices and books

The way we read and the way we’re taught to read is on my mind because I continue to struggle with my reading, just as I wrote in a piece on my reading struggles last year at this time.

My devices won again 2023. They have quite a streak going. I made the resolution to read for just 30 minutes a day, but I rarely managed that. I was too exhausted to read at night (or so I told myself), but I wasn’t too tired to scroll on my phone. I know I need to create better reading hygiene, a more inviting reading environment, but I was unable to will my brain’s patterns in a different direction.

And yet I miss the gentleness reading provides. I miss that simple pause. Reading is like taking a breath for me. If I don’t do it, I find that I’m gasping for air in the rest of life.

It’s not a good way to live. I’m going to reset in 2024. I’m not making resolutions for 2024, but I have a reading theme in mind (more to come on that).

Perhaps to start, though, it’s simply worth revisting the reasons we read. Maybe I’ll start with the idea of not reading to know a book, but to simply listen to myself.

Because a quote

“Writing and reading are gentle actions that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world.”

~ George Saunders

Because ten years ago

Where were you on this day ten years ago? I was asked this question by Past Ten magazine, and it was such an interesting exercise of memory and writing. I’m a person who loves combing through my memories, so this essay was especially meaningful for me.

Please read “American Hustle” and let me know what you think.

And then ask yourself where you were 10 years ago.

Because here’s a way to write your novel in 2024

My course on novel writing recently launched with Domestika!

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Because it would be wonderful of you to share this

1. I need to pause here to say that Nunez is the perfect author for me; I read her simply to be with thoughts). Coincidentally, her novels inspire a gentleness in me that others don’t.