Issue 13: An Ode to Slow Reading
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
This year for my birthday, my partner gave me this amazing short story advent calendar from Hingston and Olsen. My birthday is in late November, so it was a perfect gift. I could start reading on December 1 and enjoy a morsel of narrative goodness each day all the way up to Christmas.
The only trouble is, I’m a slow reader. It’s not that I can’t read quickly. When I’m grading, I sometimes read hundreds of pages a day. I usually have several books on the go and move between them according to what I’m in the mood for, allowing them to ping off each other thematically. I also read a lot of work on the internet—essays, short stories, long-form journalism. Research is, after all, part of my job. But under the best conditions, I prefer to give what I read a little space to breathe.
I find it useful to remember my love of slow reading at this time of year when the drumbeat of the New Year is still in our ears and people are announcing on Twitter they plan to put away ever greater numbers.
There’s pleasure in allowing a story to float around in the mind unresolved for days or weeks or months. With a particularly good book, I sometimes find myself going at an achingly slow pace during the final chapter, unwilling to let go of the characters or world. It builds up anticipation for the ending, allows me to admire the structure of it the way lingering before a painting in a gallery might help you better see the brushstrokes.
Why do we have this urge to reduce everything to a numbers competition? The easy answer is probably capitalism. Under capitalism, all labour must have a clear, calculable value—even reading. If effort can’t be measured and advertised, it doesn’t matter.
But reading goals, like writing goals, are sometimes counterproductive. They force us into a relationship with the text that’s about proving something to some kind of external arbiter (real or imagined). The pride we feel when we succeed is easily subsumed by shame when the numbers don’t work out exactly as we’d hoped. And what works out according to plans these days? Not much.
It’s a logic that can zap the joy from any process. That’s when it’s time to ask why you’re doing this in the first place. Is it to impress someone? Or is it because of a deep internal drive? The former motivation will work in short bursts, but the latter will serve you for much longer.
And this isn’t just about books. Somehow we’ve developed this relationship with all art that it must be consumed at lightning speed. I’m reminded of a tutoring student I once had who was assigned to write an essay about a film. She said she’d watched the movie over and over but couldn’t make sense of it, so I suggested we pull up a particular scene and watch it together. The student put on a YouTube video and set it to 3 times speed so we could get through it quickly. When I suggested that her comprehension issue might be rooted in watching the movie in hyper-speed, she dismissed the idea.
“I watch everything this way,” she said. Otherwise she found it painfully slow.
Eventually I learned this was true for a lot of the young people I work with. They couldn’t handle anticipation. A pause, to them, was just an empty space. They couldn’t sit with curiosity or tension. They were always hitting the fast forward button. I’m not above this feeling by any means, but I try to notice it in myself and actively work against it.
So the plan to read a short story a day didn’t quite work out, not because I dislike the stories but because I’m really enjoying them. I want to draw the whole thing out as long as possible. I’m now in the middle of Day 20, a surreal story by John Elizabeth Stintzi that I made myself put down before discovering the structure its heart. I’ll probably finish it before bed.
This means my yearly book count is pretty unimpressive and that’s fine. Not everything needs to be a numbers game.
Thanks again for reading. You can find me on Twitter if you’d like to share your thoughts about annual reading goals. If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika