Reading, fast and slow

Are you rushing your pleasure reading?

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I read 53 books in 2020.

I share that not as a brag. I actually think it’s too many, unless you’re a full-time book critic.

I started keeping a paper reading log in 2015 (I wish I had started that years sooner) in which I record every book I finish and the date, no comments or scores. From 2015 through 2019, I read between 30 and 40 books each year. That’s a big leap to 53 during the pandemic.

In 2021, I’d like to slow down my reading.

I don’t consciously try to speed-read, I’ve just always been fast. But I had a handful of moments during my pandemic book bonanza when I’d realize that I missed something, like the first mention of a character, or a prior reference to an event or place name in the story, and I’d have to flip back to solve my confusion. When you’re rushing, you miss stuff.

You might think that would be more likely to happen with nonfiction, but for me, that wasn’t the case. It happened with a breezy summer-on-Martha’s-Vineyard novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (I kept forgetting which names were the children and which were the adults, between Edgar, Fern, Glory, Cricket, James, and Will—for the record, I liked the novel), and it happened quite a few times with The Three-Body Problem (the first volume of a Chinese sci-fi trilogy that gets very sciencey).

I was reading too fast. 💨

I also think when you have a to-be-read stack on your bedside table that you’re excited about, it can exacerbate the problem because you constantly glance at what’s on deck. If you find yourself rushing through the current book to get to the next one, you probably aren’t loving the current book. And there are too many good books in the world (so many you’ll never get to read) to waste time slogging through one you’re not enjoying. When I found myself literally whipping through pages of Martin Amis’s memoir/novel Inside Story in October, I knew I should just skip the entire section (about Saul Bellow) entirely. I probably should have quit the book (my rule is not to quit if I’m past 100 pages), but I have liked so many Amis novels that I kept thinking it would get better. (It did not.)

Of course, you might whip through a book in a few days because you’re loving it, or it’s a page-turner, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re tearing through a 300+ page novel in three or four days and it’s not a thriller, you’re probably not giving it time to marinate, not fully absorbing and appreciating it.

It will help that in 2021, I have a few doorstop novels lined up that I suspect will require my full attention, including some I’ve had on my to-read list for years: JR (726 pages); Bleak House (866); and DisneyWar (540).

Reading so many books also takes me away from reading longform magazine features. I find you kind of have to choose between the two. In print, I subscribe to Businessweek (weekly), Harper’s (monthly), The New Republic (monthly), and Bookforum (semi-monthly)—but I let my print subscription to The New Yorker lapse five years ago and never looked back. A friend of mine is always raving to me about long New Yorker features he liked, but reading The New Yorker every week would mean reading far fewer books.

Where to find book recs

Speaking of magazines, I’m often asked by friends where I hear about books to read. I usually say “everywhere,” which isn’t very helpful.

Here’s a more specific answer: the same places everyone else checks (New York Times, New Yorker), but also, and usually more fruitfully, these places: Bookforum (print); Literary Review (print); Granta (print); New York Review of Books (print); LRB blog; NYRB Daily; Paris Review Daily; Berfrois; The Millions; Vol. 1 Brooklyn; Book Post (subscription newsletter of bite-sized book reviews, run by former NYRB editor Ann Kjellberg); Notes From a Small Press (newsletter by Anne Trubek, founder of Belt Publishing); Work in Progress (FSG newsletter); The Booker Prize newsletter; and One Great Reader (excellent interview series run by Wes Dal Val, a former editor at PowerHouse Books). I also follow a lot of independent bookstores on Twitter and Instagram (Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn, Elliott Bay in Seattle, Powell’s in Portland, Brewster Bookstore on Cape Cod, and some others). Plus a slew of little corners of the internet I’m forgetting right now.

I often learn about books through a mention or aside in a review of a different book. That’s how I heard about Small World by David Lodge, The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams, and the writing of Robert Stone. I learned about The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee from a very short excerpt in Harper’s I really liked. I learned about Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard from a list at This Recording linked to in one of Wes Dal Val’s One Great Reader interviews.

These spontaneous discoveries typically end up being the books I’ve loved most.

If you only read books that make NYT Top 10 list every year, you’ll only read what everyone else is reading or being told to read, what’s deemed “of the moment” right now. You’ll miss out.

Listening to reading

Here’s one more pandemic-prompted effect on my reading: I got into audiobooks. Previously, I had never listened to an audiobook in my life.

It started in March 2020 when my wife and I took out an audiobook from our local library (I cannot recommend the Libby app and Hoopla app strongly enough) to listen while we hiked. I hold my phone in my hand with the book playing aloud. (Don’t worry: when other people approach, I pause it; we’re not trying to ruin anyone’s outdoor experience.) Our first was Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, read by Cassandra Campbell, who appears to be the go-to audiobook narrator for every bestselling family-drama novel. It was a new way to ‘hear’ the writing and we really enjoyed it (my wife liked Everything I Never Told You much better than Little Fires Everywhere).

It prompted a streak of hiking audiobooks. Our next few were A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (excellent, if you’re patient and can savor its Magic Mountain-like panoramic), Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (read by, who else?, Cassandra Campbell—not our favorite book, to put it very kindly), The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin (fantastic, though it’s divided into four sections, one for each of four siblings, and we both hated the final section), and Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano (read by Cassandra Campbell—I swear, we were not intentionally choosing books read by her—a moving story, but it stalls halfway).

Then I picked up Denis Johnson’s short stories The Largesse of the Sea Maiden from my shelf, which ended up being my final read of 2020, and after reading the first story on dead tree matter, I looked up the audiobook just for fun, only to discover it’s read by Nick Offerman, Michael Shannon, Dermot Mulroney, Will Patton (who also performs the audiobooks of Jesus’ Son and Train Dreams), and Liev Schreiber. If that many outstanding actors want to perform an audiobook, you know the writing is good—not that I needed extra motivation to read Johnson’s stuff. (I loved The Laughing Monsters.) I ended up listening to the entire rest of the book (the final four stories out of five) on audiobook. I listened while folding laundry, making the bed, walking the dog, any down time when my hands weren’t free to turn pages. I even set my phone up outside the shower. I got through it in four days.

I don’t know whether I missed out on fully appreciating the writing by listening to it instead; I suspect I did. But hearing Denis Johnson’s visceral language, performed like a play, by these actors whose voices I know so well, was its own kind of pleasure.

My favorite books I read in 2020

Since you asked… and in no particular order:

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Cactus League, Emily Nemens

The Souls of Yellow Folk, Wesley Yang

Sula, Toni Morrison

All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

Apartment, Teddy Wayne

Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell

Normal People, Sally Rooney

The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin

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Thanks for reading with me. This kitchen-sinky first issue of 2021 was a departure from my previous structure of one book or theme per issue. Next time will return to normal.