This week in the Guardian, constant reader Bibi van der Zee experiments with going without books for a week. Van der Zee does not give up all reading (she still reads newspapers and the internet), and she does not give up stories in general (she mentions watching Being Human); all she is avoiding is novels.
After an initial feeling of productivity, van der Zee is soon plunged into a fictionless misery. She concludes that books are among her “longest, truest friends,” and that she is never giving them up again. A pointless exercise, perhaps: one that only serves to confirm what she already thinks. But the article’s interest for me is how she describes books before the experiment.
Van der Zee initially decides to go cold turkey on books because she wonders if they are holding her back. She is in the “grip of fiction,” and wonders how many of us “end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round.”
As someone who spends more of my life reading than doing any other activity, except sleeping—though given my insomnia and rapid consumption of paperbacks, perhaps not—this interests me. From childhood, we are told that reading is good. Reading anything, no matter what, is more educational and character-improving than almost any other activity. So I wonder: When does this inherently good act become less useful than the things we do not do while we’re reading?
Many years ago, I came across a piece of advice: If you read for one hour, write for two hours and think for three hours. I immediately resolved to do just that, which lasted for about a day. Thinking is hard work, and it was just so much easier to jump back into the fantasy world. Reading a book requires some mental energy, but it’s also letting someone do your thinking for you. The brain needs time to process, and we’re not properly absorbing what we read if we just pile more words on top before they’ve sunk in. Chain-reading paperbacks is no more inherently intellectual than watching all the Back to the Future films in one go.
In another recent Guardian article, Evan Maloney tells us something else we already know: Reading is an essential part of the writing process. Of course you need to read in order to write, just like you need to breathe in order to live. But breathing is not living, and reading is not writing. Talking to other writers, sending out stories, sleeping, going for long walks, and drinking coffee are also essential parts of the process for many writers, but they are not writing. It’s easy to spend the days with your mind full of ideas but forget to actually transfer them to the page. Similarly, it is dangerous for writers to read more than they write because reading is less of a fight. Slipping into someone else’s made-up world is easy bliss when you’ve struggled for hours to create your own world. I’m not advocating the Garth Marenghi approach (he claims to have written more books than he has read), but neither should we just escape into reading when we would gain more from making our own words.
This is not only for writers. All of us read, and all of us get a lot out of books. Perhaps, though, our enjoyment and intellectual gain could improve if we took time to let the words sink in, give our brains a chance to process.
I still firmly believe that reading is good, but I (and perhaps you) need to learn how to read with eyes fully open. Next time you’ve spent an hour reading, try taking ten minutes to sit and think about what you have just absorbed. Piling words on top of words is like finishing the whole cake even though you only wanted one slice. Perhaps a happy medium is in order: Try savoring words instead of gorging on stories.
(Kirsty Logan is the reviews editor at PANK and can be found at kirstylogan.com.)
