Learning to read part 3: What you like, what you need, how to find it, how to get it

“When it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.”

—Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie

(“Tommy Rotten” knowing whereof he speaks in 1976.)

Hello there! Welcome to this reading experience. We’re continuing on from the last post, “learning to read part 2: enrich your reading practice,” where we learned to slow down when we read, to add ritual to our reading, and to engage our incredible imaginations! Today I’m talking about three additional practices to repair and deepen your relationship with books: understanding and valuing what you like to read, reading to challenge yourself and grow—and engaging in the fulfilling experience of finding, and buying, these books.

You know this: reading is part of your writing practice. So if you’ve never thought about it before, the purpose of this series is for you to get in touch with your reading relationship—how are you making reading choices, how are you valuing the experience, why is it hard and when is it great?

What do you think about all this, my friends? What do books mean to you? Personally, I couldn’t agree with Tom Robbins more, books are flipping cool. It is incredibly cool that human beings invented the book, when we could have done anything! Let’s tell stories and share them and learn things and share what we learn and think things and share those thoughts using tiny tiny symbols—and we’ll put it all into a little ageless body you can carry around, open up, and spend time with! And from within that little body you can make people feel things that help them understand things and live! A book can be a million things and still be a book. A book is like an egg you can open and stare into the life inside and then safely close it up again and pass it around. What????? Ok, sounds amazing! Soft-cover or hard? Let’s fall in love together.

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Read what you like

Many years ago I was hanging on after a poetry class at Amherst, chatting with a curly-haired co-ed we called Zolot. Zolot once wrote a long short story about a prisoner selecting Olive Garden’s bottomless pasta as his last meal, a never-ending dinner to stave off death. He wrote a satirical essay about the coat check at the MoMa that won a Pushcart Prize. He got a doctorate and now he’s an English professor in the state he grew up in. But before he did any of that, Zolot was just a young dude who smoked too much weed, loved RHCP and had a question for me—one I was not at all inclined to entertain: “Who’s your favorite poet?”

There on the steps of the campus lawn, I was surprised by this juvenile ask. Where I was in school, being cool was the most important thing in the world, and too much enthusiasm or passion, too much feeling, wasn’t. Being cool meant not caring too much. There was something in the air that told us it was lame and childish to have preferences, we were meant to analyze and dissect, “love literature” but be a little cold about it. Having a favorite writer, or a favorite book, just seemed like something irrelevant—even diluting—to the serious project of learning we were engaged in. It was also risky. What you like the most could be stupid, could make you seem weak, could make you solitary, could make you stand out in a bad way, could be wrong. Liking something was one good way to be rejected by whoever didn’t like it or didn’t think it was worth liking—and to find out who that was.

I could smell a test when it was put in front of me. I analyzed his question and what was behind it. What did this young man want from me? What smirking assumptions was he carrying against me? To fight them, my answer would have to cut. Should I say the toughest poet I knew of? Should the poet I like the most be the one with the radicalest politics? If I said a woman poet, it would betray even more vulnerability—you only like her because you are a woman, too! If I said a man poet, it would show I was ignorant—you only know about him because he’s on the syllabus! I knew my answer would be wrong no matter what. This was a test I was going to fail.

Also, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t get into studying poetry until like a semester before this, and I remember panicking—I couldn’t have been honest with him even if I wanted to be. I knew the names I was supposed to know and I was learning to analyze and read poetry, but I had no answer to his question. I didn’t have a favorite poet; I didn’t even know what poets I liked. I said something about whoever we were reading in class that day being pretty good. Then Zolot handed me a book from his canvas cool-guy cross-body. It was Louise Glück. “I think you’ll like her,” he said.

His assumption that I hadn’t yet encountered this famous Louise was correct, as was his guess that this was something for me. I took his book back to my room. Reader, I did like her. I liked her a whole lot! By the time I returned the book to Zolot at our next poetry seminar, things seemed simpler—“I liked this,” I said. “Thanks.”

The next semester I went abroad to study some poets where they had lived, and started writing poems in a little group that consisted of me, a nonbinary Glaswegian, a cheerleader from Vermont, and someone’s pet pig. Then I took a creative writing course in poetry, and a few years later went to grad school for it (Zolot even helped me apply).

In the end, I learned a really important lesson from ol’ Zol: when it comes to learning to read, nothing matters more than liking. And it’s the first thing that matters, too.

This might sound odd to some of you, lovers of books, but the question, “What kind of books do you like to read?” produces immense anxiety in a lot of writers. In all my first meetings with new clients, I ask them what kinds of things they like to read, and am often saddened by the answers. I get a lot of “I used to like sci fi, but I haven’t read fiction in years.” Or, “I read a lot of business books,” which is not an answer. All the concerns about saying the right thing become an overwhelming “I don’t know.”

If you don’t know what you like, or find it impossible to say or admit what you like, to learn what you like and value that learning, we must fix this. Life is too short. One way we are always learning to read is learning what we like and love to read.

You can like an author for her style, voice, experience, or background. You can like a book for its plot or subject matter, you can like a writer for his politics, you can like the way a book feels, looks, or holds you. You can like writing that takes risks. You can like the way they use dialogue, you can like unconventional structures, you can like ‘getting lost’ in another world or you can like being found out there in your own. You can like simple prose or complex poetic lines. Just give language to it. Do you like when writers can be funny? What kind of funny? Do you like experimental genres? Do you like to be confused or surprised or carried by a confident expert? You can like anything you want and any number of contradictory things about books. Don’t overthink it, but don’t underthink it either.

Know what you like and how to feel the experience of liking, and always be searching for new things to like or love. Feel when you smile, hear when you laugh, pay attention to the way you lean in or tighten up. Sure, we grow bored, preferences change and should be tested—but we start by learning what we like and how it feels, what we naturally respond to. Knowing what we like is a way of loving ourselves.

Read to learn

Learning what you like and reading stuff you like is not the only way to make reading choices. Like I’ve said, reading is play, which means it has to be challenging or it’ll get really boring. So we also choose challenge when making reading choices—is this in a style that expands my conception of what writing can be? Is this written by an author who comes from a community that I am not familiar with? Will this subject give me a new perspective? ‘What’s the challenge?’ questions will help you make good reading choices.

What you really want to do is stop reading just for information, for “self-betterment” and “optimization.” In “learning to read part 1” I wrote about defining the verb “to read,” and we explored some of the dozens of meanings reading has carried in its long history and still holds today. As I wrote, so many of you have been taught, through school and work, that reading is about downloading information you do not have, filling up the stupid hole in your brain where you’re too dumb to live. 

That’s no way to live or to learn. So first, when you’re deciding what to read, ask yourself: am I choosing this from a place of feeling less-than, where I must consume information or read something I’m supposed to to be more whole? Or, am I choosing what I read from a place of expansion, wanting to enrich my inner world and relationships, extend how far my thought-threads can be thrown without escaping the net, and an openness to having my mind unfixed from its old ideas and stories? This helps us choose and approach our choices better.

Last March, I wrote about how writing can actually challenge the ego and lessen its power; our choices in reading can do the same. Just as some people read to consume information from a place of low self-worth or a sense of lacking (which often results in stopping reading at all after a certain point), others read to confirm what they already believe or have already been taught. This would be like taking the same train to the same destination day after day and back again. The closed loop of the commuter train. Try to be more adventurous, try to be brave. “Might I like this?” is one great question. “Oh, could things be otherwise?” (other than I think, believe, or have been told) is another great starting point when choosing what to read.

Read broadly to discover what you do not know; lean away from what my friend Jimmy, a Composition and Rhetoric professor and university administrator (but cool SF skater boi at heart) calls ‘rhetorical cowardice’—when readers say ‘that’s not for me’ or ‘I’m not the audience for it’ as an excuse to not engage with challenging material. This is a big one. Stop pushing away the books that intimidate you. Figure out why, and then find your way in. Remember to relax and be ok getting it wrong.

And really, guys, push yourself. Do a book audit on yourself—how diverse is your book collection or the things you’ve read? If you have never read a book by a writer of color, you are missing the entire world. If you have never read a woman, why? If you’ve never read fiction, try! If you have never read a translated book that comes from another country, where are we visiting first? Do not face what you do not know with fear or regret or guilt. Become the person who has read those books you fear. You do not have to understand everything or even anything right away; the layers and levels of a text may be revealed with time, experience, and learning. Your questions will lead to better questions. But you have to stop turning away from what scares you. It is never too late to read a book—thanks to the electric lightbulb!

In addition to reading to learn from a content / material perspective, we also read to learn by choosing to read things that challenge our own writing skills. Jennifer Egan says, “Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do. If what you really love to read is y, it might be hard for you to write x.”

As writers, we also read for inspiration, which is how we learn where we’re going. Choosing books that inspire you in the kind of writing you want to do is everything. This is similar to things we like, but I like a lot of writing that doesn’t really inspire my own. Reading for inspiration is not just about learning the skills of these great writers, either. It’s about feeling like, “I want to do that—I’m going to figure out how to do that.” It’s about hearing a voice in conversation with your own writing voice. Finding books that put you in the world you want to be writing in can even be part of how we create writing rituals, by first reading works that inspire us.

But, discovering books that carry skills you want to learn or the secret inspiration you need can’t happen in the closed loop of the internet mind. Time to get out there.

Finding the books

Ok, so I want to learn what I like, and I want to challenge myself and expand my world and skills. How do I find these wonderful books?

My online answer for you is to peruse the reading lists at Lithub, and browse these lists the way you would a bookshelf—stop when it gets interesting and look again, look it up. You could search “best books about whatever,” but don’t. Those lists on Google are often just algorithmically generated and / or ads and can be really unhelpful wastes of time.

In addition to ads and algorithms forcing your choices, the problem with browsing online is you can’t take the book off the shelf. You can’t heft it—will this fit in the bag I’m carrying?—or open to a random page to see what you think. You can’t feel the quality of the paper. You can’t see if it’s got some incredible illustrations that make you see the material differently. You can’t ‘lean in’ to a book you find online. Although you may be able to read a sample page or the table of contents, you have to go on whatever little scans you can find. Online, there are votes and rankings but no conversation, no one to ask questions to about the book or the author or the significance or impact. I don’t know about you, but if I want someone’s opinion I want someone’s opinion, some real person I can converse with so I can get a sense of whether their opinion is actually valuable and relevant to me!

These limitations are why I really, really, really suggest you go book-hunting IRL. Not violently, mind you. More like the way we denizens of the Mountain West go mushroom hunting. You’re searching and finding hidden beauties, but you’re also just out there in the trees. You can be with others but you don’t have to talk—not so loud, you’ll scare away the fungi! Going book-hunting is just one of the wonderful ways books make us more human and bring us more into the world. Here’s how to do it!

1. Browse. Just walk around. Spending an afternoon in a bookstore just walking around opening covers is one of the reasons life was worth inventing. Don’t be embarrassed, don’t be shy, this place was built for you. Everyone in here gets you. You can do this! If you pull something down and open it up and you don’t really like it, try to learn about your taste. What don’t I like about this? What do I like about this? Is it related to the style, subject matter, story, structure, voice, time period, or authorship? Should I stay browsing in this section or move on?

2. Talk to the clerk. They live for your questions. I told you guys about the time a famous rockstar came into my bookstore in Montana and said, “I am so bored I could die. What do you have that will make me not kill myself?” I sold him Desert Solitaire and Joy Williams’ State of Grace. Here are some questions you can ask your clerk: 

   1. “What are you liking this month?” 

   2. “I love sci-fi but haven’t read any in a long time. Anything you’d recommend that’s new or a must-read?” 

   3. “I’ve always loved this author, what do you have in that same mood or style?”

   4. “I’m working on some genre-bending nonfiction essays, I need some new inspiration. Where can you point me?”

   5. “Who is the funniest writer you have here?”

   6. “I’m interested in historical fiction, but I’m not sure where to start. I just read a nonfiction volume on this subject, and it’d be cool to stay in that world longer, see it from the human side. Can you point me to something?” 

I understand that you may not all have a bookstore nearby. But… I don’t believe you! You probably do. If you have to take a day trip to go visit one or a few in the big city, plan for it. Take a friend, it’ll be freaking great. “New Book Mission” will be one of your best friend trips ever. A bookstore is where your people are, and it’s where so much of YOU is, parts you haven’t met yet, parts that haven’t been brave enough to come out yet because they’re waiting for you to find the map! There it is! One more shelf over. You have to stand on the tips of your toes to reach it, and you stretch out and you do. Fork over fourteen bucks and it’s yours forever. I found you, I got you, I have you.

The other thing about bookstores is you can learn to read them too. A bookstore is a mind map, and if you’ve been in enough of them you know every independent bookstore is a reflection of the mind of its owner. And not all of them are curated well. Does the bookstore have interesting personal selections from the staff displayed for you, or are they still selling American Dirt by the register? How diverse is the authorship represented? Is it organized in an interesting way? What are they great at? Does the bookstore have a specialty in a genre you love or want to learn more about, like Indigenous writing or Sci-Fi or contemporary or art history? Do they have great international representation? You can ask these questions of the book clerk or owner. Go to many and start to learn what you like in a bookstore, too. This is how we expand our lives and live.

Practically, you can find bookstores to visit in your region (or travel to) at Indiebound.org. You can order books from local bookstores on this site too. And if you ever want to read a book your store doesn’t sell, you can also order books through them.

Why does this matter? It’s not just about expanding outside the closed loop of the algorithm. When you choose to only read what’s free online or cheaply produced, you might be perversely changing the way you value the written word, including your own writing. But making your own choice, and valuing that choice, is how you participate and engage with reading from the start, making the experience even more meaningful, and more likely to find meaning in.

If you are the sort of person who cares about where things come from—how your food got to you, how your clothing was made—you understand how valuing the journey a thing has taken to get to you changes your relationship to it. Deepens your relationship. Changes how you make choices. Now that you’re thinking about reading more holistically, I encourage you to think about the origins of the books you read, too, and their journeys. Doing so will add a new dimension of care to your reading practice, and make the whole experience more meaningful.

If this sounds right to you at all, here’s some advice: Stop buying books from Amazon.com.

Omg, I can’t believe you said that! Stop impinging on my freedoms!!!!

Ok, but whenever someone says to me they’ve bought or are going to buy a book on Amazon.com they always, always, always present this information guiltily. If they feel so bad about it, I wonder why they tell me. And then I wonder, if they feel so bad about it, why do they do it?

If you want to order online and not traipse out to the bookstore because it’s winter or you need 20 different books for research or inspiration and don’t want to pay full freight, that is fine! A bookstore is a great way to find books, and you can discover things you never ever would have imagined loving or needing, but you can’t buy all your books that way, even if you have some great used bookstores near you. It is just a MYTH that Amazon.com is the cheapest way to get books. An even cheaper (I’m talking dollars) non-evil digital place to buy books that does not destroy the entire world but might take 5-10 days to deliver is BetterWorldBooks.com, which supports libraries around the country with your purchase. For an even cheaper way, you can rent a book from your local library, many of which have digital catalogues and allow digital downloads if that’s your style.

If that company of Amazon.com does not align with your values, stop ordering from it. Especially when it comes to discovering books, a computer-generated recommendation engine that results from your purchases will not help you expand your mind, your world, and really learn. You’re stealing from yourself when you engage in these engines instead of with people.

Oh no, I have yet again shown my hand! It’s true, my entire purpose here is to encourage you to live more in the world, relate, and be-with. People think writing and reading are solitary, solitary-making activities. They are isolated and even lonely. We might even approve of some grim suffering, some grit of the work that requires aloneness, or in reading, be prideful of our ability to ‘entertain ourselves.’ Tosh. If to read is to relate, then let your search for books take you out into the world with others, relate to them through conversation, asking for and getting advice, trying to provide your own language of books, your own story of reading.

What’s next?

This reading detour came out of the desire to teach you all how to be better editors of your own writing. As you may recall, the first editorial skill is being a great reader. The next post will move us away from the book focus and begin your skills growth as an editor, as we learn how to participate in reading, understand what is being “done” and “working” in what we read. We are doing this in the right order—first we learn to love the page, then we learn how to love it right.

That’s all, folks. I would love to hear what book discoveries you make this month! Thanks for being here.