the pleasures of reading

Jancee Dunn, author of the NYT’s Well newsletter, asked me a while back to answer some questions about reading. Just a couple of items from my reply made their way into her column — she had plenty of other people to interview! — so I thought I would post my whole email to her here. Some of these thoughts are expressed at greater length in a book of mine.

Jancee, I think I’ll start with the “reading challenges” and keeping track of your reading on Goodreads or elsewhere. I’m not saying that that can’t be a good: it can help build self-discipline, for one thing, and you can prove to yourself that you’re able to resist the temptation to flick through TikTok or play another round of Candy Crush. But I don’t think it has a lot to do with reading as such. I often hear people who do these self-challenges talk about how many books they have “gotten through” in a month or a year, and that just makes my reading-loving heart ache. Books are not to be “gotten through”! Books are to be delighted in!! (Books you’re reading by choice, anyway.)

This is related to the question of when you should read. I look of people who want to add to their numbers — to be able to say at the end of the year that they read X number of books in 2025 — are often tempted to open a book at 10pm, stare at it with glazed eyes, make those tired eyes pass across each page, and then set it down at 11:15 with the bookmark fifty pages farther in than it had been … and after a few nights of this they have another book they’ve “gotten through” that they didn’t enjoy and don’t remember — don’t remember because they never actually read it in the first place. That’s why before they post their review on GoodReads they have to ask ChatGPT to summarize the book they’ve just “read.”

Don’t try to tell me this doesn’t happen. A LOT.

So to people inquiring about these things I would say: Do you want to read? Or do you just want to have read — or even to be able to say, online and relatively convincingly, that you have read? If you’re in those latter two groups, I can’t help you. But if you really want to read more, then I have some advice:

1) Start by re-reading something you love — something that made you love reading. If you want to read now, it’s probably because of that book. Re-connect with it, and you’ll re-connect with your reading self.

2) Never ever apologize for re-reading. Read the same thing three times in a row if that gives you pleasure. One of the most wonderful moments you can have as a reader is to reach the final page, sigh, stare off into space for a few moments … and then return to page one. (I do this with movies sometimes too: “Watch from beginning.”)

3) Read responsively. For some that will mean writing in the margins or on sticky notes, but I have found that when you’re reading plot-driven fiction you won’t want to do that: better to wait until the end of a long session and then write your responses in a journal or make a voice memo to yourself. (Apple’s Voice Memos app now has automatic transcription, so you can turn your voice memos into written text. There are similar apps for Android, the best of which appears to be Google Recorder.) One of the best ways to feed your reading impulse is to revisit your excitement about past reading experiences. Heck, even if you don’t like a book there’s fun in explaining to yourself just why you dislike it. If you read responsively you’ll read fewer books but you’ll READ them.

4) Don’t keep count of how many books you read. If you start keeping count you’ll rush, you’ll neglect to be responsive, you’ll get back into that bad habit of just passing your bleary eyes across the page and calling it “reading.”

5) New way to be the coolest kid in the room: “I only read a few books this year, but I read each of them three times and made extensive notes to be sure I got the most out of them.”

6) My idea about reading “upstream” is this: if you loved Harry Potter, you’re not going to be able to recapture the delight by reading a new book about a boy named Larry Carter who goes to the Mugwumps Academy of Sorcery. That never works. Same with all the Tolkien knock-offs. Instead, find out what books J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien really loved and read those. What fed their imaginations stands a good chance of feeding yours.

(Sometimes little things, even, are useful. In the Harry Potter books the caretaker Argus Filch stalks around Hogwarts with his snoopy cat Mrs. Norris. Why “Mrs. Norris”? Well, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park the heroine, Fanny Price, has a nasty aunt who’s always watching her and trying to put her in her place. Her name? Mrs. Norris. And then you realize that, like Harry Potter, Fanny Price is a young person living not with her parents but with an aunt and uncle … hmmm. Suddenly connections start to form between two stories that on the surface don’t look alike at all.)

7) I always smile when people tell me they don’t enjoy or don’t understand or are intimidated by poetry. I ask them, “How many songs can you sing from beginning to end?” The answer is probably: hundreds. And songs are poems set to music. A fun exercise: look for poems in rhyme and meter and see if you can find a good tune for them. The easiest poet to do this with is Emily Dickinson, because she always wrote in what’s called “common meter” or “hymn meter.” So you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “Amazing Grace” — or, even more enjoyably, to other songs that are not hymns but are in that meter. For people of my generation, I would suggest the Gilligan’s Island theme song. And then you can do a Gilligan’s Island / “Because I could not stop for death” mashup. Sing it with me:

Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but ourselves
And immortality,
And Gilligan, the skipper too,
The millionaire and his wife…

If you want to develop a love of poetry, reconnect it with music, which is its origin. You’ll not only appreciate poems better, you’ll find yourself memorizing them! Then you can gradually move on to poems that are less obviously musical. (Though all really good poems have music to them.)

8) Libraries are great places to find things that no algorithm would ever suggest to you. This is important because we are collectively losing our faculty for total random surprise — for serendipity. Libraries are serendipity vendors. Unfortunately, in our time libraries are becoming less common, and the ones that still exist are becoming less like libraries. But if you live anywhere near a university, university libraries tend to be open to the public, and also tend to preserve their collections longer than public libraries do. Even if you can’t check out the cool random book you discover, you can sit down with it for a while. And then if you love it you can buy your own copy.