what's the point of reading?

it's 2024

On Sunday, while waiting for my film negatives to dry in the shower, I sat on the floor and sipped hot lemon water (the closest I’ve come to a daily wellness beverage since moving to California) and read Mary Gaitskills’ Bad Behavior – until one of short stories kind of upset me. It was about sex and abuse, and it didn’t end in the way I’d anticipated. I threw my copy back onto my not-entirely-functional vertical book stack and picked out another.

I had barely started the next chapter of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: The Surfing Life, when my boyfriend expressed some surprise at me swapping out one book so quickly for another. I was like, Who cares? The book’s relaxed personal narrative was exactly what I was in the mood for – and my copy was right there. End of story.

But then again, it’s 2024. Isn’t the point of books to power-through reading them, inject their personal growth into your bloodstream, and post a review on Goodreads? They’re not like TV shows, which you can pop into after a long day of work and forget about when you close your laptop. In an era of six-second online info-tainment, books are sophistication and endurance. Actually reading them is hard, but everyone wants to have read them and gained their prized insights, so we end up with New York Times articles about the popularity of bookshelf wealth, which means showing off a nicely curated shelf of books you haven’t read (?), and paid apps with the sole function of summarizing book findings into 15-minute “guides” (of both fiction and nonfiction!). 

We’ve got it all wrong. I’m here to report from San Francisco’s tree-enclosed, empty public libraries, tech-backed book presses, and countless loud-music, hard-metal-seat coffee shops to say that books can mean a lot more to this cultural era than we currently let them.

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When I reopened “Barbarian Days,” I picked up almost seamlessly from where I’d left a few weeks ago, every character re-entering my brain as though parachuting in from an unseen plane. I’m always impressed by the brain’s ability to pick up a book and almost instantly recall names and details I haven’t thought about in weeks. It forms such a stark comparison to Tiktok or Instagram Reels, where I might spend an hour scrolling, and be unable to recall a single notable video. Or if I do manage to recall a video, it leaves barely an impression. When scrolling, my brain relaxes into a sleeplike state, so perhaps it is less consumption and more passivity. Wind through my ears. 

TikTok and Instagram Reels are certainly trying to be consumption, though. There’s plenty of funny and smart content creators vying for our attention, but the nature of something being so short and featured in an endless scroll renders it difficult to be meaningful. Imagine if Jane Austen had made Pride & Prejudice as a Tiktok – would we still watch it hundreds of years later? (Well, maybe, I don’t know.) Even the funniest Tiktoks wash out of popular culture in a few days – but books that came out a decade ago still get referenced on nights out with my friends. This is unfortunately related to the why. Books take a lot of time and focus - it takes time to develop ideas that are worth thinking about 10 years later. And we’re lucky that books have been around so long that we have the chance to develop these intergenerational and intercultural points of connection. There’s no Tiktok describing the experience of womanhood in the early 20th century that can rival what you can learn from reading Virginia Woolf.

how i spent my morning before work

As I have said before again and again, we live severely time-constrained lives – where it’s just not practical to devote hours to reading Proust and Tolstoy and every hot piece of autofiction on the Top New Books February 2024 list. Unfortunately you have narrow your field down somehow; you have to make an effort to find windows of time; and you have to stop yourself from reading things you don’t enjoy. I don’t know of any perfect solution to the infinite reading list, unless you’re one of my only two friends who recently met their reading goals: one who found himself on garden leave from his crypto trading firm, and one who had to hand her work laptop to the Feds “for the second time.”

Reading many books

Occasionally someone asks me how I read so much. My secret has always been that I read a lot of books at once. Like I said about the brain’s ability to remember things, it’s impressive just how easy it is to code switch between Kerouac’s Big Sur and Houellebecq’s Atomized (ahem, not that I’m reading either). I associate reading with having fun, because I’m reading what I’m in the mood for, more or less. Sure I can’t claim to be actively reading everything on my shelf, but I discovered a few years ago that a rotation of a half dozen or so books is enough to maintain variety while ensuring some kind of progress is made. But “progress” isn’t the word I want to use here, because it implies you have to “advance” and “achieve” with reading – as opposed to enjoying their raw prose as you like, which should be your primary concern. 

Of course, payoff isn’t always immediate, and I recognize that. If I were only reading for gratifying entertainment, I would have abandoned Cărtărescu’s Solenoid after the first page (Instead I abandoned it around page 350). Sometimes you have to give things a bit longer to see if they’re worth reading. But reading, as a whole, does not need to be a painful experience. There is something out there you’ll like if you dare to look.

Reading for connection

Another reason to read is the ability to connect with someone about it later. My friends and I jostle over David Foster Wallace short stories. My boyfriend and I send one specific Ben Lerner passage back and forth. My brother and I laugh about Taleb’s narcissism. In the five-minute awkward pause waiting for everyone to join the work Microsoft Teams meeting (we should really have a name for that by now), my coworkers consider the relevance of Joan Didion’s essay on the State Water Project. A group chat of e-friends debate the best author photos (William Gaddis is a current winner). There’s just a lot to talk about.

Reading what you want

Some say the first novel was Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, published in the 11th century – so there’s nearly a millennia of fiction out there to explore. Internet sites like Goodreads make the search easier. In fact a few weeks ago I started reading a hugely-popular fantasy book last week that I learned of from the #Booktok community on Tiktok. (I hate the fantasy book, it turns out, but I’m really glad I gave it a shot.) But ultimately the only way to discover what you enjoy is, of course, by reading: expanding into new and weird genres, directly pulling out books from the shelves of the Bernal Heights library until someone asks if you’re there with the high school class. 

Reading for focus

Anecdotally I’ve found that the mornings I spend reading tend to be my most productive in other ways – whether that means contemplating my existence while making breakfast tacos, accomplishing more at work, or just managing to get more chores done because I’m not in the social media vortex. There’s a real argument to be made that reading trains your ability to focus, and how that focus lends itself well to other parts of your life.

Reading how you want

I like to read half-lying down on my couch, a pillow behind my head, a candle inexplicably lit, something like green tea or an old-fashioned beside me, and my phone turned upside down. Setting the right environment is crucial to reading more than a few pages (I’ll never understand why people read during 8-minute BART commutes, except maybe to find a boyfriend impressed that you’re reading Marx at 9am). Above all, just be comfortable. When you associate reading with doing something you like and being in a place that you like, it feels a lot more like an escape from work, and a lot less like Adult Homework.

setting myself up for success