January: flossing, and other habits
There is a lot of pressure that gets put on January to be a habit-forming month: the gym, salads, or (my yearly bright-eyed vow) regular flossing. Renewing my other annual promise to myself—to read 100 books—isn’t something that can be accomplished solely in January, but something about this month gives the same urgency and energy to that vow as it does my briefly-zealous willingness to shove a small string between my teeth every night. What I do in January, the month’s cultural mythos promises, is what I will do all year, and so I had better get off on the right foot. And so last year I read 15 books in January, and the year before I read 18 books in January, and this year—
Well, while 7 books in a month feels stupid to complain about, I’m feeling a little bit of anxiety about what it means for the health of my reading habit.
The thing is, I’ve had to come to accept that, as an adult, reading is routine and muscle as much as it is pleasure and instinct. As a kid, this never occurred to me: in an age before smartphones, and in a household that banned most television aside from Red Sox postseason games and a daily half-hour episode of “The Simpsons,” reading was something I mostly had to be prevented from doing too much of. There would be parental raids on my room after mandatory lights-out, and I’d hide my flashlight under the covers and fake deep-sleep breathing. I’d be dragged out from under the living room coffee table, book in hand, when it was time for dinner. At parent-teacher conferences, I was usually described as a good student who needed to put my book down and pay attention when the teacher was talking.
It wasn’t until a year after college that I realized that somewhere in those four years of unfettered computer access and a lot of mandatory (and graded) reading, my childhood compulsion to read had faded into something unrecognizable. I still had the sense of myself as “a reader,” an identity that I’d proudly claimed ever since we did a fourth-grade project that involved labeling the sides of a shoebox with different words describing who we were. But somehow I was no longer actually reading very much at all. I was watching every episode of The Wire while eating in bed, and I was spending about $2 a day buying lives on Candy Crush, and I was even cooking and sometimes going to the farmers market. I had a job. Many of these are good things! But I missed reading. I missed being someone who would rather have been reading.
And so I basically decided to fake it until it was true again. Namely: bringing my actual habits back into line with the kind of reader I had been, and wanted to be, meant developing a lot of the same fledgling self-discipline that I was also exploring as a person who did her own laundry, and taxes, and got up every morning to commute to work. I developed a sort of reading muscle-builder plan that I still turn to when (in months like this one!) I need to rebuild the atrophying muscles of my attention span:
Read at least 50 pages in bed every night before turning off the light. (This also helps with sleep!)
Read 50 pages a day total on my commute. (I’ve learned that if I don’t pull the book out of my bag immediately after boarding, it starts to seem not worth it, like there are only a few stops left and it’s easier to just grab my phone and then I’m working on the NYT crossword app for thirty minutes.)
Rule 2a here is that it helps to be reading two books at once—a tome that you don’t want to lug around for in-bed-at-night reading, and a nice paperback for reading one-handed while balancing on a lurching subway car.
Read 50 pages a day during lunch. (For this, it helps to actually take your lunch break.)
One hundred and fifty pages a day adds up quickly, but this kind of regular—almost scheduled—reading also helps whatever I’m reading at the moment become more instinctive to pick up than my phone in a bored moment. It helps me fall into the plot of a book more quickly, until I genuinely need to know what happens next—until I’m wandering back home from my subway stop oblivious, book still in hand, bikes swerving past me in the twilight. Practicing, trying, making myself read is what helps reading become again—for a book or a month or a year—what it was for me as a kid: “an appetite; a feeling and a love.”
January 2020 Books (synopses linked in titles):
Armadale, Wilkie Collins [****]
Collins’s all-time masterpiece is still, for me, The Woman in White, but this book was a good itch-scratcher: a baroquely complicated plot full of legal twists and turns, gorgeously detailed characters, and equal parts hilarity and pathos. As usual, he writes his major women characters with rare complexity, nuance, and agency. Many of his books, this included, consciously explore and critique the limitations and burdens that the Victorian moral and legal system placed on women who didn’t fit into standard societal roles—to do that so well and still write a fun, dramatic page-turner is a feat! My only complaint about this particular Collins book was its overabundance of gothic tropes, which I enjoy in Victorian fiction only when they appear as parody. Still, for the Collins fan looking for their next fix, this book won’t disappoint.
Malice, Keigo Higashino [***]
Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly searching for a contemporary mystery as good as—by as good as I mean as cozy, intricately plotted, fun, and genuinely readable—Dorothy Sayers’s outstanding Lord Peter series. Or at least Agatha Christie’s better, more inventive works. This book, translated from the Japanese, was as close as I’ve come in a while—the plot itself was excellent, with a compelling mystery and clever structure and solution. My only real disappointment was a significant one: I felt like there wasn’t much happening in the book outside the structure of the myself and investigation. The detective didn’t have much of a life or personality, and the story missed the humor and wit I love so much about Sayers. It could have been a bad translation, though, and Malice was certainly good enough that I look forward to reading more Higashino in order to find out.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald [***]
Fitzgerald was actually one of the authors I started with when I decided to make myself read books for pleasure again after college—I’d never taken American Literature (a notoriously bad class and a wonderful guidance counselor who told me “you’ll have that teacher over my dead body”) in high school, and then I mostly read Wilkie Collins in college. So I picked up The Great Gatsby, and though, huh. I see why everyone talks about this book.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is not Gatsby, but it has the same balance of wide-eyed wonder and festering melancholy. The title story in particular is almost science fictional, something I’d never associated with Fitzgerald before, but it works—the strangeness of the 1920s’ gilding expanded and caricatured to what ends up feeling like a logically impossible conclusion. The only thing that ruins this book—but ruins is not too strong a word for it—is the constant, grinding onslaught of the racist stereotypes that, needlessly and unbearably, parade through the background of almost every story.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon [*****]
Maybe another book I would have read if I’d entered a single American Literature classroom in my life, or at least one that hope is being taught in such classrooms. This was one of those novels where the tagline “great American novel” feels right, not so much because it’s a great book by an American author (which it is), but because it feels like an essential narrative about America: big and broad and full-color, generously detailed, telling a story that is specific and sweeping all at the same time.
I am not a comic book person, but I have some clear and fuzzy-warm memories of paging through old compilations of Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman while I waited, at my parents’ friends Henry and Sheli’s house, for the adults to finish the boring part of Seder dinner (namely, reading a communist Haggadah called The Red Haggadah). Reading this, a book about comics and imagination and Judaism and immigration and America, made me nostalgic for those compilations, and for those seders. Chabon writes about all of those things bumping up against each other with the inevitability and the soft-focus nostalgia of a childhood memory, something waiting, fundamentally true, for you to remember it.
Enter a Murderer, Ngaio Marsh [**]
Another attempt to fill the void left by Sayers in my detective fiction life—as if such a thing were possible! This book, which was a murder mystery so perfectly adequate and ultimately boring that I have, at this point, forgotten both the identity of the murderer and the motive for the murder itself, was mostly a reason to admit that I should stop kidding myself and just re-read the entire Lord Peter series again.
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss [*****]
A slim and eerie book, about a girl coming to discover a world beyond the one she thought she knew while she reenacts, with her family, the daily life and habits of ancient British peoples. It’s hard to describe too much of the plot without giving this book away, but it is creepy and liberating at the same time, gorgeous and twisted, and near the end, I cried. Moss captures the very worst and best that people can be in a very small span of pages, gorgeously rendered and brilliantly inventive, too much to take and too precious to put down.
Women Talking, Miriam Toews [****]
A lot of the themes of this book, based on the true story of a group of Mennonite women dealing with the aftermath of horrific abuse, were similar to Ghost Wall—the potential evil of people and the liberating fellowship of women—but this book is less subtle than Moss’s, ready to knife you in the ribs where Ghost Wall is content to whisper an eerie warning. Parts were actively hard to read. But its determination and joy are just as fierce as its horrors, just as breathtaking. There are no easy places in this book (as in, one imagines, these women’s lives)—no gentle paragraphs of description, no odes to landscape. Everything feels urgent; the book nearly thrums with intensity. Unsubtle, awful, brilliantly stupendous in what it says about love.
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