Learning to read part 2: Enrich your reading practice

Still learning

We are always, always learning to read.

I’m in a phase of reading right now that is completely new to me, and unplanned. I started thinking about this “learning to read” series about six months ago, no idea that during the course of writing it I’d experience my own profound change with this thing I’ve done almost all my life.

Near the end of the summer, there was a sudden tragedy. Something that had never happened before and will never happen again, a singular event that changed everything. When something shocking happens, the shock is so much an experience of not-knowing. Your body knows what happened, but your brain doesn’t believe it. When you try to comprehend, a white wall appears, hiding all the language you know behind it, and the language you need is buried underneath. You don’t know what to do or say, and you don’t know why, and you don’t know what happened, and you don’t know what will happen next.

In response to the unknowingness of shock, I inhaled books. I ordered everything I could find on the subjects related to what had happened and what would happen now. I found personal copies of books that would never have been Googleable at the used book store. Someone had experienced something like this and written about it. And in the notes, signatures, and dog-ears of the used books there was all this evidence that other people had experienced something like this too. Before I read a word of these books, the connection to these people filled me with emotion. When I brought them home, just having them close to me made me feel so much less alone.

I’ve been reading for language and guidance—for portal and survival—my whole life, but I have never in my life read so explicitly with the priority of relating. Once I started, that was all I wanted. The academic guide-books and perspectives on what had happened were fine, but the memoir, the human stories held me and everything. This happened to you, too? I relate to that. Yes, that too. That sounds familiar. That’s right. It was heartbreaking to relate, even while relating began the long process of putting the heart back together.

Even though I’d had the idea before—I wrote about it in the previous post in this series—I was learning to read as relating in I think a more pure, unsubtle way than I ever had before. To feel alongside. It felt necessary. I went into these books looking for information, practical guidance, for language to help my loved ones, but what I found, and what I kept reading for, was the simple and unbelievably needed experience of relating to someone and feeling related to. To find myself saying yes to someone while we were all still screaming no.

I’m still learning to read, I’m still learning how deep this can go and how widely it can serve us, so that we can become better able to serve—as writers and people. Whether it’s nonfiction or poetry or novels or short stories, whether it’s about psychology or dinosaurs or dogwoods or cities, the act of reading is an act of hope the second you realize that it’s all just about people. Our observations, our values, our priorities, our work. It’s all us. How to understand and connect with us. If it’s a book about the sea it’s a book about a person pointing at the sea. So what will you learn from that?

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This reading series is about your relationship to reading, which just might be part of your relationship to something even bigger. And when you start to pay attention, you might see how many dimensions there are to the practice of reading, and how your relationship with one or more or all of those dimensions can change over time, at any time.

This is a blessing. You can stop thinking of reading like you did in school—something I can get wrong, do wrong, be wrong at. You can stop thinking of reading like work, or a source of guilt, or a broken relationship. 

As I wrote about in the previous post, so many writers I work with have a troubled relationship with this thing, this entity of reading. They read stuff online, or one kind of work-related guidebook, but books hurt. They feel like they’ve lost something, an ability or a passion. Everyone also seems to think they are alone in this. So many people dropped off reading when Covid got bad—I stopped reading for a while, too. So did Lisa Lucas when she was executive director of the National Book Foundation. Unless it was news, I was not able to ‘be in it.’ People lost their focus that could keep them anchored, their ability to relax that makes reading helpful and enjoyable, even just a sense of safety that makes sitting presently in a chair really hard. I think a lot of people are feeling that same way again. Who can read in the fog of war?

I understand this so much, you guys. You might have a great relationship with reading right now, or are going through something with reading like I’ve been, and the next two posts will help you deepen your reading and discover new dimensions. And if you feel like you’re one of the ones starting over, it’s ok. And you can take your time anyhow. But I want you to get back to books. I think maybe what my story shows is that reading can so often be part of how we move forward, even when it feels like we’re staying still.

Your Reading Practice

Twelve or so years ago, I was sitting on a train traveling from Newcastle to St Andrew’s, Scotland. I had just visited a college friend, a Newcastle native (now a barrister in the wig) who took me to “the Toon” (the soccer stadium), for a match (game). On the trip back north, the train was packed with happy drunk Geordies (people from Newcastle-on-Tyne, inexplicably) singing city songs, families on a weekend holiday, and myself as usual observing.

The young families and packs of revelers tended to scoot up and down the train, visiting friends and making new ones, trailing laughter back from the bar car, their worlds alive and colliding within this moving world. I sat in my seat and watched the outside—leaving the city, the gentle fields of yellow canola, a man outside a station holding a sign,“Keep the RAF in Leuchars,” as we crossed into Scotland.

Though I’d grown up riding the train, it struck me for the first time that this was a very delightful thing to be doing! In my seat unmoving, I was buoyed forth through streams of stories and lives, possibilities and full-on realities new only to me. Like Galileo’s planet, I felt that I was still, and yet I moved. You’re there, in one place, even as you’re moving through many countless places. And it’s from this settled place you catch up with the world.

Stillness and movement. Silence and communication. Alone and together. Yours and mine. 

This is reading. A meeting place of polarities all aboard a train. The book someone else wrote comes to life in you, through your life. It is an affirmation of your own life and your connection to the unseen, unknown lives of others. You sit in silence and you are communicating with yourself and the author and all her influences, too. The book carries you into your emerging present as you dive into its never-changing past. No one else who read the book has the same relationship with it that you do. No reading experience can be replicated. Yet the book and the experience you have with it can be shared.

These are remarkable things. These are miracles to me, the way it holds these competing forces in perfect absolute harmony. The very act of reading takes you inside yourself and well outside yourself at once. The route is a loop. Let’s learn how to ride.

Remember, this is a two-parter, so you’ll get Even More Enrichment for your Reaching Practice next time.

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Take it slow

If you’re struggling with focus, comprehension, or enjoyment in reading, start by slowing down. 

Don’t try to ‘get through it.’ If you start to get frustrated with yourself, because you’re not getting it, you read the same paragraph twice and missed everything, and you’re not making progress, don’t hit the gas harder, and don’t bail yet. Take a deep breath, maybe close your eyes for a few seconds, stretch, return your gaze to the page and slow it down. Take it word by word. If you keep drifting, put your finger on the page and follow along as you did when you were first learning to read—this is the equivalent of counting your breath in meditation. This act of physical engagement can get you out of your distracting thoughts and into the act of reading.

When you’re too stressed or anxious to read, you can actually use reading to slow down your thoughts, to calm your body to put it in the place of receiving that makes understanding possible. Again like with meditation, or writing—when reading is hard, reading makes it easier. Don't get up and walk away, use the words to focus and clarify the mind when it is busy and doing too much. Say, “Ok, brain, we are here.” Put your finger down or press open the page, feel it. Here we are in the book—or at least on the book for now. Feel the expansiveness in the front of your mind grow as you slowly read word by word, until you grab the tail of the kite again—a word is comprehended! A sentence has landed! Hold on. Slowly climb your way up the tail, focused reading of word by word, until you're sailing on the kite of the page. 

Comprehension is not the first point of reading. Slowness reminds us to begin through experience. Letting go of the pressure to understand everything or even anything is sometimes the right move. Sometimes we understand later. Sometimes we read first for feeling and then return to analyze. When you’re on that train looking out the window, the first thing you do is see. There might be some things that are really recognizable, so much so that seeing is understanding. Yet on other journeys, you might not understand what you’re seeing, and yet it would be absurd to say you cannot see. The seeing counts too, and is in fact an unmissable step. When you get nervous about comprehension in your reading, think about just seeing first.

Open a page and look at it, look at how the paragraphs are, look at the length of sentences, see if language trips or skips or flows down the page, see the page. Then see the words. Some you know, some you don’t. Some look interesting. Some will be comprehended, some will not. Such is a life of seeing. There is no understanding without seeing, so however far you get you know you’re starting in the right place. Seeing is the first step: “here we are on the page.” The next step is “here we are in the world the author has created.” (The third step is “here we are in the world.”) By slowing down and seeing first, you will be surprised by how much your mind is capable of comprehending.

Also, don’t worry about speeding toward the end of the chapter or section or seeing how much you can read in the next hour. I don’t love the words “surrender” or “submit,” but when you’ve committed to being on the train, it’s not good to keep getting up and checking whether you can safely jump from here.

Reading slow makes enjoyment possible. When I read in my head, it’s basically the way I’d read it out loud, to someone else. I read slow enough that I read with the cadence of speech. That’s why reading is fun to me. I am not skimming, death to skimming. Don’t just read, read to yourself. Put some emotion into it, feel your way to understanding. You are relating to yourself by doing so.

Ritualize

I wrote about setting rituals to protect your writing time and space a while back. If you’re struggling with reading practice, rituals can help too—in this case, the goal is very simple and doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort.

Your reading ritual should be whatever helps you relax and enjoy the experience, that’s it. There should be nothing else to think about.

What would make reading time better for you? Coffee, tea, a glass of wine? A better chair, better lighting, a lovely candle? Reading in the morning or before bed? Juliette Binoche reading beside you? Experiment and find what makes reading feel luxurious to you. You don’t have to make any promises to yourself. Just find what makes reading feel good. There will be difficult texts and not every book you’ll want to read will be a pleasure, certainly, but reading is a gift and you should give it to yourself like one.

Relaxation is particularly important in writing and reading because the brain shuts down in a state of stress. Relaxation is necessary for comprehension, and the imagination and the creative mind come alive in a relaxed state. And imagination is a really, really big part of reading.

Imagine

Oh the sweet reliability of the rail. You sit by the window, you see out of it, and some pleasant alchemy moves your insides to create—memories are inevitable, thoughts might stream in seemingly from nowhere, you might even be called to take a note. Meanwhile, by merely sitting and seeing, the whole world happens.

Reading is like that—if you had to also believe in the train in order for it to keep going.

As a reader, you’re participating in an act of co-creation with the writer. We can participate in TV and film in how we interpret, relate, and experience them, critique, judge, understand, and communicate about them, but the viewing experience is passive—the imagination you’re imbibing is fully someone else’s. Perhaps even an Imagineer, who I understand is a professional figment of the Greater Imagination.

You might be expected to imagine yourself in place of the characters in a film or show, but that could actually be called projection. Kind of diff. Reading, in total contrast, is an act of imagination, I could even say as significant an imaginative act as the writing itself. Think of Wide Sargasso Sea, born in the brilliant author’s act of reading another book. Or yourself any time you changed something in your life based on something you read. Such creative acts require enormous power of imagination, even if the writer has supplied the root or the raw goods.

It is simply impossible to read and not imagine, and how big that imagination gets in response to what you’ve read is something you can often choose. Inspiration is the activation of the imagination, and you can blow on that fire or snuff it out. Feel that, really experience how much your mind moves when it’s reading. It’s amazing. You read one thing and your mind does all this stuff. It creates images, it puts together faces, it paints and makes music while you read, if that is what the book calls for. It conjures things it’s never seen and locks in new connections. It makes judgments on what is being read. It analyzes, it compares, it considers. It weighs. It dives into memory, it flies into future possible realities. It comes up with ideas for your own writing and life, as you read. You are participating in a dynamic and constantly shifting interaction, with yourself, the writer, the language, the material, and the people you’ll engage with after this book has changed you. Including your future self, becoming in the act.

Next post I’ll write more about how to participate in your reading, of which tuning in to the imagination is just the first step. For now I want this reminder to help you engage differently in your reading, with more appreciation for yourself, the reader. Your imagination is alive, notice that. From the author’s detail you can conjure their world, create a new one, or recreate your own. If the clues in the writing brew up something interesting, pay attention. Take a note in the margin, or close the damn book and look up at your life all around. Knowing what I know now, what will I decide to do?

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That’s it for your first three reading practice principles! Next week we’re getting into gnarly awesome shit about how to figure out what you like to read, how to learn through reading in a healthy, non-fearful, non-consumption-based way, and I’m also going to impinge on your personal freedoms and suggest buying books differently than you probably do right now. I had put it all together into this one post, then I realized it was 6,000 words and I was still writing. There is SO much to say! Maybe I will start a spin-off newsletter called Reading Group 🤷🏻‍♀️