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I don’t set me quantitative reading goals. I read as I live, compulsively and without much planning, which means I’m averaging about a hundred books a year, mostly fiction. In terms of sheer mass, I do well, it’s just that I often can’t remember almost anything about them once I’m done. I read a lot, but very badly. This has never been more evident than in 2020, when my tendency to read nothing or mindlessly force-feed myself crystallized.
Almost two months have passed in which I could only read tweets, news and desperate emails from friends. I also couldn’t listen to music or watch movies with any concentration. When summer arrived, I had started reading again, in a spirit of mania rather than relaxation or contemplation. I read dozens of thrillers in a particularly stressful week, filling in the back catalogs of some pretty prolific writers, and I couldn’t have told you much about them the next morning.
My literary comfort food is big family and marriage novels, the more domestic and low-stakes drama the better. I love bickering and almost imperceptible emotional whims and unrealized infidelity. I’ve read dozens of them this year, too, still in the slippery rush of pure consumption that I’ve absorbed interchangeable thrillers with. Some of these books were artfully constructed and stylistically impressive and emotionally insightful, and some of them were the equivalent of a more innocuous Nancy Meyers movie, all void of middle-class unease and loud chatter about nothing much. I didn’t care what kind they were in my unconscious haze. I just wanted to be calmed down, to feel passive, full and secure, and sometimes I did. My reading, however superficial and quick it is, without thinking, was a method of adaptation and I do not regret it.
In 2021, however, I plan to quit those habits and start a more ambitious reading life. I reflected on a practice my father had when I was a child. He would buy me a book every week or so – he said if there was anything we should be debauched that was that – and it worked about only for every three pieces of frivolous reading he funded. , there was a more difficult book added to my library. If I read Nickelodeon shows for three weeks, then the fourth, I’d try my hand at Dickens or whatever in the classic and literary sections caught my eye.
When I was a teenager, just before the internet became totally ubiquitous, my cultural habits were exciting and hungry. I came across things that I liked and used them as a basis for digression. I read texts on the back of Virgin suicides then researched the authors to whom Jeffrey Euginedes was compared. I read broadsheet reviews and jotted down references that I didn’t understand and tried to catch up. I bought something randomly from the “new in” section of my local bookstore every few weeks. This meant that I read things that I found perplexing, hateful, and boring, but rarely found that I regretted doing so.
As an adult, I became lazy. I learned what kind of book I enjoy the most and read a thousand more like them. There is nothing wrong with reading for fun, of course, but there is a certain balance between entertainment and enlightenment, one that I hit briefly in my youth, when I read a lot and put myself regularly challenged. At the time, I didn’t consider a book refusing to give me comfort as a book failure. I often read words and ideas that were unfamiliar to me and had to work hard to elucidate on my own, and once I found my way through whatever they had led me to, there was an additional reward to have.
Now is not the time to chastise ourselves, and I am not engaging in self-recrimination when I say I want to expand my repertoire this year. We have lost not only emotional peace and comfort due to the Covid-19 disaster, but also excitement. We have stress, yes, and anxiety, but no dynamism, no movement. I believe that trying to read with a renewed openness will not be a punishment but something to soothe, just a little, the loss I feel at having no color in my life. The notion of self-care can sometimes be recast as strictly indulgent behaviors to the detriment of the self which is supposed to be cared for; having a bottle of wine and a take out pizza to relax is good, but taking care of yourself also means doing the dishes, taking a walk and taking a shower.
When I was a kid I was more open to trying anything because I didn’t yet know who I was going to be. I was always striving to become, and that was why I was eager to read everything. Even the things I hated were valuable because they gave me new information about myself. There comes a time for most adults when they think they’ve stopped becoming, but we never really do. There is always more change to come. I want my reading life to reflect this as we try to endure a time when stagnation is sadly mandatory. I’m going to take my dad’s fun in three parts to try and make it happen.
• Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation to be released in March by Jonathan Cape.
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