Have you forgotten how to read? It’s not just you. How did this happen? Is it because you lost your focus? Has your focus been stolen from you by nefarious algorithms? Is it COVID’s fault? Is your need for speed and productivity and getting shit done that’s making it impossible for you to read?
Whatever the cause, maybe it’s time to flex your latent superpowers of hyper-focus, and immerse yourself in the deep shadowy waters of Slow Reading.
WARNING: Slow Reading won’t make your rich or smart or cool or productive. Like you, Slow Reading has no purpose, needs no goal to justify the time and effort. Slow readers read for sheer pleasure, for love, for giggles, for the horror, for the experience. Slow Reading is for now.
For Beginners
1. Start with something short.
Re-read books that inspired you from forever ago, that mythical, formative time when you read as if your future life depended on it. Start with picture books, and move on only when ready. (I recently listened to Orwell’s 1984, a book I loved and re-read several times as an early adolsescent. During the re-read I was overwhelmed by how much this book influenced my values over a lifetime: Love of subversion, smoking, fear of rats, distrust of media and red lipstick, fear of surveillance. The list goes on.)
Read aloud. Read to a child, the plants, your cat, your lover. Read to yourself. Breathe the words, the phrases, the meanings. Pause with dramatic emphasis. Notice your voice in your ears, and the vibration in your throat. Marvel at how little black squiggles scribbled by someone else far away and maybe long ago arrive as vibrations in your chest and throat and ears that then bounce around as images, sounds, meaning. Writing is enchantment. Reading is magic.
Ask someone to read aloud to you. Maybe they will let you sit in their lap as they read. Fall asleep in their arms. Later you can wake up to the warm cookies they baked for you.
Listen to a recorded book. Is listening to a book really reading? Do you feel superior when you read a physical printed book with your eyeballs to those lightweights listening to mp3s while they do the dishes? If so, you ableist dickheads might feel seen by Baronness Von Sketch.
For Advanced Slow Learners, multitaskers, and other fidgety types:
Dance as you read. Don’t think interpretive dance is for you? Then read (or better yet listen to) Zadie Smith’s Dance Lessons for Writers, or Twyla Tharp’s Keep it Moving, Thera Heder’s How Do You Dance? Then, try NOT dancing along. I dare you.
Listen to a recorded book while reading the text with your eyeballs at the same time.
Doodle while reading an audiobook. Is there any better way to show you’ve paid attention?
Read while walking. I learned this trick as a student in university, almost too late. I was failing in classes, often falling asleep in the library trying my damndest to be a what I thought was a good student. Perpetually late for work, I started reading books during my walking commute to save time. The walking served to keep me awake, but I swear there’s something more to it that that. I started engaging with the reading in ways I hadn’t before. I started remembering things. I started enjoying the reading. Making connections to what I was learning. Maybe somebody’s done a study about how people learn more when their bodies are active.
Read while bathing. Not so good for the book, but what an immersive delight!
Books I’m reading, very slowly.
Nick Cave Faith, Hope, and Carnage.
Octavia Butler. Kindred and The Parable of the Sower. (How did I just now get to these?)
Warsan Shire. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.
Joy Williams. Ninety-Nine Stories of God
In other news:
Theatre is Dead. Long live 15-minute Phantom
In case you forgot, it’s not too late to write that novel. November is National Novel Writing Month: Here’s some inspo from the archives on how to be a writer.
We are American writers, absorbing the American experience. We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us.
Joy Williams, as quoted in Paris Review