An essay on feeling comfortable with whatever you read, and being okay with not enjoying reading too

Surfing on YouTube, I came across channels which catered to reading. One was of an astrophysicist who recommended books that shaped his scientific temperament (which is how I found about Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, a book I’ve raved about – those who follow me on Instagram and Twitter may know), another was a literature student who check-listed 100 books he read in the previous year (mostly from his curriculum), and finally one from Timothy Ferriss, the guy behind the 4-Hour Workweek, in which he gave tips to speed-read by engaging your peripheral vision. It’s this video that struck me most, not because I flinched when he physically drew lines on the paper with a pen to delineate the periphery of focus, but because in a span of 10 minutes, he had turned my hobby, my leisurely activity into a mechanically optimized task.

A friend told me whenever he suggests books to his colleagues, he gets radio silence, not so on other topics. There’s a Dorothy Parker quote that goes, “I don’t like writing. I like having written.” I suspect it’s the same here. People love ‘having read’ but abhor the effort that goes into reading. That’s where people like Timothy Ferris come in to make the process quicker, sharper, cleaner. Why read a line when your brain can take half of the sentence and fill-up the rest based on heuristics? Why read a book when you can skim through half and let your mind make up the rest? Why even read when you can see the title and let your imagination run wild?

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I was 8 when I attended a wedding. In the baraat, a 500 Rupee note fell and none of the musicians picked it up. I did and brought it to my grandfather, asking him what should be done. Keep it, he said casually. But what will I do with it, I asked. Whatever you want, was his reply. I’ll buy comics, I said. Sure, we’ll go in the evening tomorrow, he said. And true to his word, he took me the next evening and I bought an astronomical amount of comics (well, 20 comics but try telling that to an 8 year-old). When people talk about reading to me, I keep that kid in the back of my mind, someone who not only derived joy from comics but someone who was pushed to read whatever he wanted. And it’s a consequence of that, that my bookshelf is a mish-mash of authors, cultures, colours, topics, paperbacks and hardbacks, that can never arrange itself into the contours of symmetry that I see so often on Instagram, now that I’m active there. And it’s this kid in me who is saddened when he’s asked to offer tips on ‘quicker’ reading, ‘smarter’ authors, ‘better’ books, ‘worthwhile’ topics, ‘Top 10’ titles. We don’t like reading. We like having read.

Another friend shared that an institute that prepares people for MBA interviews gives out summaries and talking points of popular books so they may say that they enjoy reading as a hobby. Clearly, there is some social currency which this hobby possesses, enough to warrant this façade. But this social currency is concentrated in the hands of a few who dictate what has to be read, at what age, and by which author. I get wary when I see a list of Top books to read in your 20s/30s/etc. because most are regurgitations of similar lists. Notice how titles like ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, and ‘The Harry Potter Series’ are always there. Isn’t it curious that ALL the writers agree on titles that have exceeded millions of copies? How come no one feels a book read by just thousands is worthy of a ‘Must Read’ tag?

Even within reading, some authors and genres are pooh-poohed. The mass popularity argument, while applicable to those lists, fails when ‘massy’ books like that of Chetan Bhagat, Durjoy Datta and the rest come into play. Suddenly, everyone is capable of spotting plot-holes and lacklustre stories. I’m no better. For years I looked-down upon the genre and its readers. Why? I don’t know. I suppose one was expected to. But my turning point came with Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room Of One’s Own. Much like her other work, it’s a dense read. But her philosophy has shaped my attitude towards reading and writing, and is responsible for my churning of articles on this platform with impunity.

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private–school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides’, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? ‘This great book’, ‘this worthless book’, the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” – A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

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Back in 2018, I had read books fast enough to make it to the Top 200 Reviewers in India on Goodreads. I felt compelled to keep it going and rushed through books to keep my rank alive. Owing to my academic curriculum, I couldn’t. That year has the highest number of titles that I’ve read and the lowest retention. I had Timothy Ferris-ed my hobby and made it a task. I was swimming through pages, rushing to get a gist and moving on and letting online summaries fill my blind spots. What others saw was an impressive number, what I felt was guilt. Losing that rank was the best thing that happened to my reading. I’ve not tried getting it back.

Coming back to Ferris and his litany of tricks, I sense it’s the cult of productivity poaching another victim. The cult that tells you that unless you exhaust yourself mentally and physically in your youth, your work isn’t of value, unless you consume more things, your status isn’t of value, and unless you read all the latest books by the most acclaimed of authors, your reading isn’t of value. It’s that cult that wants you to hold on to your schedule and cram a book or two into it, leaving out the fact that all of life is a trade-off. An hour spent reading is an hour that could have gone anywhere else – minting money, learning Spanish, jogging outside, or catching up on Netflix. My trade-off comes with avoiding TV series and movies. I am hopelessly lagging in them and I have no qualms about it. I chose to let go of the social currency and bonding that comes over commiserating on how poorly Game Of Thrones ended, something that was all that people could talk about when I was doing my internship last year.

Have you tried asking your friends what 5 episodes you can watch of Money Heist in order to say that you’ve seen it? Have you taken tips on catching up on them at half the time? Have you judged a colleague because all he watches is sitcoms? Has anyone told you that only documentaries are worth watching and everything else is low-quality dross? But readers hear this all the time! ‘Good’ readers read diversely. ‘True’ readers know only classics are worth the time. He’s not a reader for he reads only short stories. He’s never even read a book thicker than 300 pages.

‘Quicker’ reading, ‘smarter’ authors, ‘better’ books, ‘worthwhile’ topics, ‘Top 10’ titles. We don’t like reading. We like having read.

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Let go of the idolatry of reading. Bring its stature down to a humble hobby, a consumer of time, a filler of thoughts, a mark of leisure. For those caught up on the guilt of not getting into reading, find a hobby that you don’t find a chore, that doesn’t brand your personality, that is just a word sandwiched between multiple words, separated by commas when you write an ‘About Me’ that people read but never remember. For those caught up in the fear of not reading enough, forget that there’s a right book to read, the right age to read, the right author to read. Read what you can lay your hands on, read trash and read gold, and label them that yourself. Fellow readers, let go of your high-horse of having read serpentine sentences from sages centuries ago. Don’t judge someone for falling for a literary cliché because an elitist snob is the biggest one.

The purpose of this long-winded rant is to take the mystique out of reading. As a reader, I may be committing treason. When I sit to read, it’s not fairies and rainbows around me. When others see me review a book online, what they miss is the number of times my mind wanders from the page, the times when I doze off and the book falls on my face, times that I skip the dictionary because I’m lazy and I’d rather imagine the meaning of the word, times when the author isn’t making sense, and when the author is but I’m not. It has frustrations, struggles, disappointments, and failures. But I love it. I love it in spite of it. I love reading and having read equally. That’s how all hobbies work. Without cheatsheets.

If you’ve made it this far, I applaud and thank you for sticking around. Getting people to read this blog has been tough from the day me and Ahana started writing. I could suggest they use their peripheral sight and draw a line on their phones to halve their time but I don’t want to answer complaints about removing marker lines from smartphones. If you’ve made it here and don’t consider yourself a regular reader, let me congratulate you on having read 1800 words today. You made a trade-off of your time and I hope this was worth it. At the very least, for today, you are no longer Reading, you are Having Read.