In recent years I have discovered that I like to read short books. I am not sure when this habit started, but I have a suspicion. After I stopped working in politics, when I began again to read in earnest and discovered just how little I had read, I began to keep lists of books completed. I would note down each title and the month and location at which I had turned the final page.
Because I was travelling a lot at the time, these lists are quite satisfying to look back at. I can live again, not only the story of the book, but the story that lies alongside it, the story of my life: the Laotian town where I read about Sylvia Plath, the Roman holiday on which I read The Flamethrowers. They were handy, too, for recommendations: if somebody asked me if I had read any good books lately, I had only to trawl through my list and pick the two that seemed most suited.
A list of books read soon tuned into an exercise in efficiency and comparison.Credit:Thinkstock
But what started as an aid to memory quickly turned – as most things do these days – into an exercise in efficiency and comparison. How many books had I read this year – more than last? I didn’t have to wait until the end of the year to check: in April I could see whether I had fallen behind my average. And sometimes I had, and so what was the solution? Short books. A casual observer could deduce this from the lists themselves: after I finally got around to reading Don Quixote, across a long series of cold dark mornings in London, the next two books were very short indeed.
This year, for me, has been a poor year for reading. I have read far less than usual, and struggled with lack of desire. I have picked up many books and set them down again. I am not alone in this: many others have written similar accounts. Short books have been the saving of my reading year: if it were not for brief volumes I would have read barely any books at all.
There are two common explanations given for this shift in our reading habits. One pre-existed the pandemic: the invasion of our lives by technology and its demands. The other is anxiety created by the threat of COVID. The argument is that our minds, worried about virus, are scanning for threats, engaged in constant vigilance. Part of that vigilance, psychologists have argued, is the hunt for information – scrolling through Twitter, flicking from news site to news site – in an attempt to control what cannot be controlled. In turn this advances the invasion of technology. The two factors, technology and fear, loop round and feed each other.
This is probably true, but I prefer a simpler explanation: for many reasons, some shared and some not, we are all by now very, very tired.
Whatever the cause, the reading I have not done this past year has left a gap. I was, thanks to the virus, already engaging with fewer people, fewer minds; and now that is more true still. It means, too, that in a year in which most of us have been restricted in our movements for long periods, that my mind has also been more caged: it has been exposed to fewer thoughts, it has visited fewer places, lived through fewer events. And you can tell this from my list, too, which began to tail off early in the year before fading to nothing in July. I have read some books since then, but did not note them down.
Recently, I have felt an itch; an urge to begin again to read. Immediately I thought about how to make best use of this. Perhaps I could start with the short books which sustained my list early in the year, and use them as a type of training-cycle, to ready myself for longer books. And as I began to have these careful, practical thoughts I felt the urge to read fizzle again.
And now I have begun to wonder if there is something in the fact that the urge to read returned with the fading away of the list. If there was something in the task of accounting that – not on its own, perhaps, but combined with the exhaustion of the pandemic – diluted the joy of reading.
In one of my favourite short books, Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso writes about failing to keep her diary as religiously as she once had, as life took over: “I came to understand that the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” Similarly, I know that if I don’t keep my lists I will forget what I have read – but perhaps, too, that is the price I have to pay in order to continue reading.
By which I mean real reading: reading that is merely pleasurable, not undertaken with any aim in mind. Reading that is not concerned with how many books one has read in a year, nor whether a book is long or short, current or not, respected or not. Reading that is as free as books themselves should be; that makes use of the same freedom that is the very point of art.
Fittingly, I came to this realisation partly through accidental, undirected reading. I had bought a book for diligent reasons, but had not managed to diligently read it: instead, I had skimmed the prose lazily, reading only what I felt drawn to, continuing to read only when it held my attention. Reading for no purpose other than reading. And in this book of essays, by the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, I read that a book should be read not for anything one might get out of it, but only for itself; as an end, not a means. And so, he wrote, “Read at whim!” And that is what – I think, I hope – I am going to try to do.
Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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