Why I read; why I don't read

Do you guys ever go through periods where you find it almost impossible to sit and read more than say 5 pages of a novel/book? I'm ok with magazines or newspapers or whatever, and the 2 books I need to find I have really enjoyed for over 300+ pages each (about 150 left to go w/ both and i really want to see how they finish).

― if there is a King Moaty, apparently he is huge into slapstick. (a hoy hoy), Thursday, February 17, 2011 10:43 AM

I'm in that phase a hoy hoy. And it's not the first time either. Several contextual things (just moved house, some, ah, affairs of the heart) but also it can just happen.

― Herr Kapitan Pugvosh (GamalielRatsey), Thursday, February 17, 2011 10:49 AM

One thing I find is that the more time I get to myself, the less I need to read. If I'm busy at work, especially if it involves heavy interaction like meetings or working closely on a project with somebody else, I can cope but find it draining, and escaping into a fictional world can be a fabulous release to get out of that. On the other hand, if I've had a day pottering about on my own then that need feels like it's been taken care of.

What things stop you from reading, or get you into it again?

I was working and by association travelling a lot from November to February and there is no better way to kill that time than with a novel. Doing a rough total in my mind I must have read 1400 pages all put together (finished 3 novels, a bunch of shorts, a non fiction book and halfway through two other things). And then that stopped. And I started seeing someone. And now my days are based around trying to sort out my awkward sleeping pattern again (work nights 3 days a week and love life... or not).

But even so, I've had lethargic times before and they didn't kill dead my concentration like atm. And its not like I am stuck trying to start something I dislike, either.

don't commute, reading limited to immediately before sleep or on rare weekend mornings where i dont have to get up.

i work usually until 5 and then i have to drive for an hour to get home. by the time i'm home i feel too tired to do anything, including reading. also my job makes my brain tired. this has stopped me from reading :(

Commute reading is useful, makes me focus a little more. Good for novels, which I don't much sit with otherwise; sometimes I'll puzzle at foreign language stuff, which feels likes it answers the crossword impulse in me. Lunchtimes, I usually read a paper or the LRB - can't open a book for some reason.

Evenings I usually do stuff (internet, dvd, eating) for 2-3 hours, then read/scribble till sleeping. It's often unfocused tho'; it'll occur to me to pick something else up, or go and find smthing in library catalogues or on Amazon, or check ilx, etc, etc.

I sit in a library when I'm not in an office. There I tend to pile up a lot of books and skim them till I find things that I want.

My trouble isn't really not reading, it's not focusing: I'll go through periods where I just don't finish a book.

I don't often not finish what I've started but I do go through huge phases of just not reading anything, then charging through three or four books in as many days. It's an annoying habit and I feel I'd probably get through a lot more if I was just a bit steadier.

almost never read books, have been like this for years

somehow manage to do quite a lot of peripatetic reading via internet but even w/ a two or three page article/essay i will have a alt+tabbed to something else while reading

often have 3 or 4 differents books on the go at a time and end up not finishing a good few.

Re-read quite a lot too.

am v slowly getting thru fred jameson's #1 tome

i promise to read this weekend

My trouble isn't really not reading, it's not focusing: I'll go through periods where I just don't finish a book.

yeah.
something that kinda reassures me, although probably in equal measure panics others, is the idea that there's been this shift in what i get from reading, now. i remember someone on ILX talking about the idea of starting the year with their provisional reading lined up on a shelf, ready to work through sequentially. i used to read in a way more orderly fashion, but having incorporated a) libraries and b) the internet into my life, it's way more of a supplementary, topical thing now. I think I don't finish things because I'm sometimes satisfied reading a chunk of something to complement a current interest in a thing, and then find that I'm drifting on to something else. It bothers me when I'm drifting from novels that i'm enjoying to others, just out of some kinda frenzied library-loan-happy pursuit of the platonic good novel, but i'm generally okay with more diffuse reading patterns.

ps people who feel compelled to finish books out of literary obligation/bookstarting-duty are crazy and so i am fine with not belonging to that club

I've been reading a lot more lately after my wife bought me a Nook. It's so much more travel-friendly than paper books.

Also, yeah, I only finish books when they are compelling enough to finish.

i can be not bothered by the not-finishing & scattershot drift for good stretches, but I want to (and like to make sure I still can) engage with an author at length every now again - different aesthetic quality to the reading, sense of getting to know (hopefully liking) a personality over a few hundred pages. Like I can find out more about eg Burke by skimming, flicking around, reading intros, articles etc etc, but I'd prefer to have thicker knowledge, sort of thing that comes from sitting for a while with an author, following his voice + mind. It's a more satisfying pleasure, but knowing-about, hither-thither reading is informational crack & I can't resist.

This thread is kind of depressing.

"If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end." - Don DeLillo

I could go on about why I read. Add some more quotations. Maybe write about my attempts to prevent becoming a "second-order illiterate." Still, it would be hard to answer the "why I read" question. Not trying to make any judgements about people who don't read so much these days (I totally understand the not enough time or energy/other priorities/easily get distracted reasons), but I just really like reading.

good for u

I guess "kind of depressing" was a little overboard, maybe "occasionally disheartening re: some comments"" ? I dunno.
Looking back over the thread, I do see that a bunch of people who commented that they are reading a good bit.

thanks nutty dread.

Have hardly been left alone for 30 mins at a time without someone talking to me or the tv on or some pressures to do something else w my time, in the last YEAR. Really enjoying the return to spending time in my own head. Will help my reading enormously.

I am going through a slackwater time with reading right now, which is unusual for me. I blame it all on my new work schedule that requires me to wake up ay 5:15 am, and start work at 6:15 am.

My normal reading time is after supper in the middle evening, but by the time it rolls around I am too brain-fagged and the window of time before I crawl into bed is too short. It takes a bit of keeness to read consistently, and I have become a dullard.

kind of a whole other argument but my reaction to this:

"If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end." - Don DeLillo

is "baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllls"

^ serious writing

ya

delillo is alright tho

Pre-reading cultures being filled with unidentified people shockah.

Did he say that to get class-participation credit?

Very little reading for me for ages, with the very clear cause being that I have a friend's 1st draft to read, can't read it in the bath / in bed / all the usual places, with it being loose pages and requiring some proper alertness, but don't want to mix it up w/ anything else. It is p. counter-intuitive but the more writer-y friends I make, the less reading I do. I have at least got past the stage where my own writing stopped me reading. That was dumb.

i think i've managed to read 7 books already this year, which is probably already halfway to the number i read in '10. i've cut down on my internet use considerably as well and it's made me a lot calmer and happier in a rather short amount of time.

Read all the time, still get drunk, get laid.

^ the upper-middle class 'smoke weed every day'

I understand taking a break from reading; I don't understand admitting to love reading but "not finding the time," especially if you're a writer.

Man, I read all the time. On the bus, on my lunch break, on my days off (I only work part-time), until late at night. I do fuck-all else, though. Got a pile of movies/TV shows I want to get around to watching, but that's hours not to spend reading...

of course, the number of unread books I've accumulated means I have to keep up this mental pace or else I've wasted a shitload of money.

my reading is down a bit in the past 6 months due to new baby and working two jobs but i still manage to read a fair amount. i read for entertainment; i am entertained by learning new things, a good story, and/or quality writing. i do have stretches where i can't get into any books or pretty much only want to read "lighter" things, this is usually when i'm stressed out/tired or am more into other things (like making music or playing video games or whatever).

i think it's just-really-liking reading that means i read less now! When I read fiction I like to be able to ignore all else - I don't have very much self-discipline when it comes to stories, I will find myself picking up the book again to read just one more chapter, and just one more, and then whoops it's 4am and I have to be up in three hours and my brain wants to do a couple of victory laps. Which is great when I can take a day off, but means that commute-read books have to be non-fiction or poetry. And now I don't even have a commute. (or rather such as i have is on a bike)

but then there's also the fact that i'm doing research that pretty much consists of sitting around on my tod reading things - when i've got free time i feel like i should be talking to people and hanging out and going to places, not... sitting around on my tod reading other things.

Yeah I have no truck with not having the time--I have the time, the truth is I just spend oodles of it on ILX or blogging or doing writing of my own, and my reading tends to be unfocused and scattered as a result. When I first moved to the DC area I got through a few books in just the first month because I had a daily 90 minute train commute, but now I spend 5 minutes on the train and 40 minutes walking, so train reading only tends to occur when I'm heading somewhere in the city.

I've tried to pick up on audiobooks to compensate, but it's just a consistent reminder that I'm not an auditory learner--I constantly find, while walking, that my attention has wavered and I have to rewind to find my place again.

I'm taking on the Complete Elizabeth Bishop nightly, and it's not so daunting what with Bishop's noted paucity of output. That's something, I suppose.

I'm a big fan of reading short books. I have friends that are on-and-off readers that try to tackle Infinite Jest or something and then they get all frustrated and quit and don't read any books for a long time after that ... until they resolve to read Infinite Jest again.

I'm guilty of forcing myself to read dull books that by rights I should have given up on hundreds of pages sooner. It's happening now with Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World.

xp - my copy of Infinite Jest is still shrink-wrapped. I bought it because some of my friends from college were going to do a book club thing and discuss it, but that never happened. It's been about 5 years since, and I kinda want to keep it on the shelf, still shrink-wrapped, as a symbol of sorts.

have it on the shelf, ready for when i run out of books about swords and dragons

i have a bunch of books about swords and dragons on my shelf ready for when i run out of modernist classics and daring 800+ page first novels

i wish i was kidding

wouldnt swap you

soooo many swords and dragons in IJ, I swear.

When I was at my family home, more or less sans internet, for a fortnight over Christmas, I read something like 2,000 pages of stuff, inc. three novels, an essay collection, a short story collection and assorted other stuff. Since I got back, I've read something like a hundred pages of fiction total and v little of anything else too. Internet time-wastage is part of it, but I don't really know what the full deal is. One thing is that I wish I could start novels in the middle - often I'm very slow to pick up the pace on novels but once I get properly into them I'll read a couple of hundred pages in a day. Another thing is really bad time management - I have a lot of stuff I should be doing but no particular structure to my day in which to be doing it, and so while I'm not getting it done being on the internet is a kind of procrastination that I could potentially break off at any second, while reading feels like more of a serious 'thing' that I'd be doing instead of the actual things I should be doing.

i am trying to keep my promise to read but i don't know what to read. my primary excuse must be laziness. i think i should just start a new book.

2 da library

I think I am only capable of reading comic books! I flew too close to the internet and now I need pictures. ;_;

http://img573.imageshack.us/img573/3065/0113cshepardsfederalcit.jpg

xpost

when i stop reading a book and i go back to it after a while i feel a pang of shame that i don't remember what the book is about and i really did want to read it at one point

unreg we now have computers to do what those books do

oh

I like reading. I read because it is fun to do. If I don't read it is because I am busy. I am happier when I am reading than when I am not reading.

when i stop reading a book and i go back to it after a while i feel a pang of shame that i don't remember what the book is about and i really did want to read it at one point

it is worse when you pick it up and you're too hazy about what happened to resume, but it's too familiar to start again and read through a lot of stuff you kinda remember

Abbz as a published comic book artist i think there is no shame in that game!

did you guys read a lot while you were in university? like, independently of assigned course reading? wondering if i should feel guilty abt not having read any complete book or novel last semester

Lit student, read on avg. 2 books a week?

I tried starting Nabakov's Mary and couldn't focus on more than 2 pages. Nabakov! wtf is wrong with me?

Life: "Hey guys looking at this painting will tell you the meaning of life"
Me: "Ok but eyes gone blurry, so i'm just gonna go sleep in the corner."

did you guys read a lot while you were in university? like, independently of assigned course reading?

Not to make you feel guilty, but yeah, that time would have been horrendous if reading only existed as a chore for me. In retrospect, I think of certain semesters as author-specific - "the Chandler semester", "the Nabokov semester", etc.

ha, mine was the same but it would be "that semester i attempted [book x that is fucking huge and complicated] while also studying" and "that semester i attempted [book y that is fucking huge and impossible to read] while also studying"

sweet, i mean--it's ok to make me feel guilty, i want that

i'm studying econ & will prob minor in math, neither of which are reading intensive obv, but so far i've just been dicking around and taking lots of history & lit electives most of which are 100~150 p/week and idk spending time reading for leisure when i can barely keep up with my course readings seems unrealistic. i wanna at least think about getting on it though

yeah just wait till you have some free time (free time when there aren't exciting other activities, don't give up beer for books.)

Long commutes from work/school/home were probably life-savers.

OTOH i am reading and posting on ilx at the moment WONDER WHAT OTHER ACTIVITY I COULD BE DOING HMMMM

my commute is solid 30 min both ways but its 15 min walk & a 15 min metro ride w/ a transfer so i dont even try to read

OTOH i am reading and posting on ilx at the moment WONDER WHAT OTHER ACTIVITY I COULD BE DOING HMMMM

ha - I've got a Javier Marias novel just staring at me from across the room, along with like two projects I'd could be writing, yet here I am, blissfully wasting time.

always. competing for my attention are ursula k leguin the left hand of darkness, which i'm reading as part of a book club some friends of mine are starting, and john kenneth galbraith the great crash 1929 for a class

Oh I can also read the poetry of William Blake, which a NERD might consider proto-comics.

William Blake was the Jack Kirby of his day.

As a fanatic reader, I'm extra glad I didn't actually do English at uni--killed the joy of books for several friends

I don't really read that much anymore. It used to bother me, but I'm pretty ok with it now. When I do read, I usually read non-fiction. I have started on a fiction book, but haven't gotten past the first chapter yet.

got two one hour-plus journeys tomorrow, hopefully will try to get back into the swing of things.

I don't really know why I read or don't read but once I get the ball rolling I can't seem to stop reading. I've read 7 books since the beginning of the year, four of which in a one week span in January and the other three in the last week. And I know that just as suddenly as I started reading, I'll stop. This has been the case for the past two or so years, where I read about 30-40 books, almost always in groups of 3-5 books in a short timespan and then nothing for anything from a couple of weeks to two or three months.

I don't read enough books, but I usually feel good about finishing them, when I do finish them.

I still haven't got very far in Barry Davies' excellent autobiography.

I'm a slow reader, but also, to balance that, I like to think I am quite an attentive and thoughtful reader.

I read lots of other things like soccer reports and pointless comment threads online; like lots of other people I know I waste much time on this trash (trash = the threads, not the reports); but then I suspect that there may be some kind of function in the wastage, well, maybe.

I have also watch more films / dvds than usual which I think is a decent, rather than inferior and soul-destroying, alternative to reading.

There is something about processing experience by writing about it which is valuable. To that end I feel better when I manage to write things on my little weblog. I haven't often written about books on it but I have just remembered that I did manage to write this, once:
http://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/nicholson-baker-lrb/

* = 'I have also been watching more films / dvds than usual ...'

Why do I read? I guess there's a compulsion there. I read a lot when I was a child, and through into adulthood, so the act of reading partly defines me both in how others see me, but also how I see myself. To not read makes me itchy. In a not very meaningful way, the book is a dummy for me - I feel more comfortable with one than without. Why, apart from it having been something I've always done? Well, I know that if I don't read, then I can feel the world closing in on me, which may just be an expression of feeling trapped by myself - the other viewpoints that books give (even the worst ones - you're listening to someone else) assuage feelings of imprisonment. Not serious ones, believe me - I'm not trying to make this out to be more melodramatic than it is I hope - but just feelings of not being able to reach beyond myself. That may be indicative of a lenten imagination, or an inability to put myself in others' shoes without the aid of constructed narratives. I hope not.

So it's both an expression of me and a way out from myself. Odd really.

This psychological approach isn't the only one, but it felt like another way of approaching the question. I read as well for entertainment, because I'm bored, because I want to find out about stuff, for the pleasure in words, to be provoked, to be able to go at my own speed, because I'm bored in a more profound way than most tv can do anything about (by more profound I'm not saying more important btw) and need the slow-burning stimulation that reading brings, also the intensity of poetry is a thing unto itself - all the usual all the things that have built up over a lifetime of reading. I sometimes think this 'book as extension of self' makes me a less thoughtful reader (it's essentially a self-centred process) but I don't think it does particularly.

I've slowed down as a reader as well - terrific skim reader as a teenager, much much slower now. I like finishing books but frequently don't. Nevertheless I feel the end is usually quite important, the imaginative peroration, and am dissatisfied if I don't get to it, unless I've thrown the book down in disgust or a build-up of minor irritations or a sudden realisation of boredom.

What about not reading? There was a big period between 12-15 where I didn't read much (tho read a fair bit of science-fiction and horror and comics). It was laziness. Mental laziness. Also wanking and skiving I guess, hanging round with skaters in multi-storey car parks.

Sometimes what will stop me reading now is a feeling of a lack of direction. Just one damn book after another. I quite like a project, at least to form some sort of spine to the reading, but something in me feels quite bleak at the feeling of 'what shall I read now' on putting down a book, like I'm biding time to the grave. Also some ill health can stop me. I've had a few problems over the last few years, which for various reasons I find make it extremely difficult to read, a sort of hyper awareness of my own physical state makes it difficult to relax into the book without feeling continually pulled out of it. At it's most extreme, my head feels like an utter clod, and the best way I can describe what it's like is some sort of literary equivalent of lack of affect. The words on the page mean nothing, it's impossible to get even the barest emotional meaning from them, and reading becomes a purely mechanical exercise in moving my eyes over shapes with individual meaning, but which mentally I cannot link into greater meaning (even over a paragraph). I find this extremely frustrating to say the least, fearfully so in fact.

Great excitement or agitation will stop me reading. Became mildly infatuated with a young lady recently, and reading mainly consisted of half a paragraph + 20 minutes of soppy window-gawping reverie. That's fine, don't mind that.

Fear of reading something that has been created but not creating myself (a feeling that reading is essentially a lazy activity, to be done at the downing of tools) will stop me reading.

Having written all that I suppose it's a wonder that I enjoy it at all, but I do. I do love the bad things about it as well. I like hating books, or ripping them apart, finding good bits in bad books, bad bits in good ones. Little fascinating nuggets in long dull self-published diaries.

I haven't read that over because I've got some sausages that need attending to (note: sausages will stop me reading) but I suspect it comes across a bit weirder than it was intended to. I like reading because I'm a normal person and sometimes don't read because I can't be arsed, wd probably have been a better answer.

tl;dr

ha ha. fuck tho - it was so long. Maundering.

Pinefox I had no idea you wrote things! I like that piece very much. Do you want to borrow The Virginian? It's a really good record, I think.

I read it--I liked it! Some thoughtful stuff there. Definitely with you on some of those feelings, like the world closing in when you're not reading, and the self-definition. If I didn't read a lot, I'm not sure what else there would be of me... which is quite worrying, now that I think about it.

That sounds kinda like

"If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end." - Don DeLillo

I'd love to hear The Virginian, some day.

btw I also liked Pugvosh's self-analyzing thoughtful honesty. The one thing I don't like about him is that all the online names he gives himself are so ugly and cumbersome, probably much more so than his real ones, which makes it hard for me to know how to refer to him.

no, 'the pinefox' is not ugly and cumbersome, how dare you

how about 'kap'.

'sup, kap'.

up through college i read constantly as if it were the most natural thing to do with my spare time (and even time when i should have been doing homework or reading for class or something). i didn't really 'not read' for any symptomatic/pathological reasons, just the occasional disinterest, fatigue, etc. i also, i notice, had no interest in watching tv then (and it was awful silly to try to pick up a broadcast network on my roommate's little 9-inch tv all the way across the living room). i generally finished what books i started, although as i started reading harder books there was some resistance (lots of repeats and stops before i got done with my first complete read of 'gravity's rainbow', a big pause in the middle of 'underworld') and i did occasionally just punk out or find something better to do (like when i was too busy to stick with 'the plague' when my friends and i read it together, or too aggravated by 'invisible man' to be able to stick with it).

around the time i started grad school i also started a decade-plus stretch of rarely finishing books, combined with compulsively seeking out new ones. a lot of the things mentioned upthread apply here, but mainly now—now that i'm done with school and trying to write—i'm finding that it's easier to stick with books again, though now on newer terms. it was not often in school that i had to read entire books for external purposes (courses, writing projects). and i often found them not very satisfying to read in full because i needed things that were in them, but struggled a great deal against their not giving me exactly what i needed—say, because i wanted to develop my own ways of thinking about the things in the books, but lacked the resources to take what i could and leave the rest. but now that i'm feeling some parity between my interests and what i seek to get (extract) from some of the books i'm reading, i'm learning to read more productively again, if not for the first time.

i'm re-learning how to read literature, too, as hardly reading any novels in full for so long really seems to have hampered my ability to read receptively and even to take an interest in the stuff and the ways of fiction. i did read more poetry in grad school than i ever had before then, though, so it's nice now to read some more and feel that i'm not returning to something i'd let go to rust so much as starting to make good on what i first learned a little bit about in the past.

Do for you pinefox?

That's an improvement, Ron.