Reading

A couple weeks ago, back when I was still at college, my girlfriend asked what I was writing about in my notebook, and I said, “I’m writing about how I need to write more about the things I read to improve my writing.” I had no idea why she broke down laughing at first, but pretty soon I realized that the whole thing was pretty convoluted and had at least four levels of meta (writing about writing about other people’s writing for my own writing). Ridiculous as it sounds, though, it was important for me to make a written commitment to writing about writing, because reading has never come easily to me.

I always feel jealous when people talk about how much they read as kids. It’s the kind of boasting you see a lot, especially in literary circles, the kind you can get away with because there’s a certain self-deprecation attached (“You can bet I didn’t get out much!” or something like that). My older sister and younger brother were both that kind of voracious and natural readers, my sister read widely and early, and my brother jumped straight from near-illiteracy to the entire Little House on the Prairie series when he was bored one summer. For me, on the other hand, I had the idea that reading was hard, and anything hard must also be dangerous somehow, so I treated thick books like radioactive material and stuck to a narrow set of mid-length books from series that I knew were safe, mostly Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the secret series by Pseudonymous Bosch. I became a sort of junior scholar of these books, reading the same chapters over and over again, rarely stepping outside the texts where I felt comfortable. 

Aside from school assigned books and a couple young adult fantasy series, my reading went through a dormant period in middle and high school, which lasted until I went to the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and felt like such an imposter among all these accomplished, well read people that I knew that I needed to read as much as I could as fast as I could. That started an era, which lasted up until recently, when I spent every break from college reading quickly and poorly, trying my best to make up for lost time. I took the opposite approach as I had as a kid, choosing the longest, hardest, densest  books that I could reasonably finish. When the story lost my interest, the furious desire to be the kind of serious writer who reads serious books carried me through however many pages there were to the finish. I don’t want to undersell this time, I read a lot of books that I enjoyed and that inspire me to this day. But, looking back at the shelves of books I’ve finished since then, there are so many that I only recollect hazily. There were so many subtle turns of phrase and nuances of the plot that I missed in my rush to get on to the next book. 

An English teacher quoted Kurt Vonnegut at my class once, to reprimand us for complaining about some reader-response assignment: “Reading without writing is like eating without digesting.” At the time I thought that out teacher, and Vonnegut, were setting hopelessly high expectations. I’m not sure what’s changed in me since then, but now the expectation seems reasonable, and the alternative terribly wasteful. I’ll teach plenty of English classes after I graduate, but I’ll never be a student in one again, I’ll never have this designated time to unpack what I read. So my only option, really, is to set aside a notebook and a little bit of time after each book to think through what was going on, how the author said what they said and what it all meant.

During study breaks between my newly online classes these days, I’ve set up my own system of studying my favorite books from the past few years. This week I’m looking at descriptions of landscapes, reading them and writing little notes about how the authors do what they do and what it all means. Next week it’ll be character introductions, and after that dialogue. There’s so much that I missed in these books, so much power in the language that I skimmed, already looking forward to the next thing. It’s almost disgusting, how I wasted these books. But that’s okay. I’ve got plenty of time left in my life, and a lot of it’s free now since I’m stuck inside to dodge the coronavirus. I can catch up.