On Reading: a post-graduate journey of my reading life

I was thrilled. It was only March 3rd and I’d completed Roger Angell’s Let Me Finish, my thirteenth book of the new year. If I kept at this pace, I thought, I’d be able to read nearly eighty books by year’s end, something I’d wanted to achieve since reading Stephen King’s On Writing. “If you want to be a writer,” he said, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” I wanted to be a writer, so I appreciated King’s advice, but it was nothing I hadn’t heard before. The twist is that King also gave his numbers: “I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year.”

If King’s seventy or eighty books made him a slow reader, what did my nineteen make me? That was my average for the past three years, years I’d been studying for my Masters in English. Most of those books were assigned by my professors, and I read them deliberately, doing whatever I needed to do to understand the material.

My usual reading routine was to start each book while seated in my La-Z-Boy recliner. If the cushioned comfort made me drowsy—not unusual, especially in the evening—I tried to stay alert by moving to a firmer, less comfortable chair. If I still felt sluggish, or if I had trouble focusing, I walked through the halls of my house, forcing words into my brain, reading sentences aloud, repeating them over and over, sometimes in raised voice, hoping my wife didn’t take notice.

For my fourteenth book, I selected Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas A. Blackmon, a history of African American re-enslavement following the Civil War. I had purchased the softcover the year it won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, 2009. I know this because I save receipts and use them as bookmarks. (I’ve also appreciated how receipts provide a timestamp to my life—I can think back and reflect on where I was, what were my interests.)

For thirteen years, Slavery By Another Name had been sitting in my bookcase, hardly touched except for random bouts of shelf dusting and reorganizing. Prior to starting the book, I did a flip-through, previewing paragraphs here and there, and realized it would be a slog. Douglas A. Blackmon had done an extraordinary amount of research, packing it with characters and locations I found unfamiliar. I’d have to keep my computer nearby, and interrupt my reading with searches of locations and character details. But that’s what I expected, it’s what I wanted, to learn about the years following the end of the Civil War, a period of which I knew so little. What better resource to have in my hands: a Pulitzer Prize winning work about those years.

Reading the book presented me with another challenge, however, that seemed like a deal breaker—the diminutive font. When I read a book, I often backtrack to check content, to see if what I’m reading relates to something I’ve previously read. With Slavery, everything was so small—little words stuffed on little pages—that sifting through the text was wearying. It also made me angry at the publishers. I wondered if they decided to shrink the text in order to cut down on the number of pages—my paperback totaled 400—to make the book appear less daunting. Did they fail to consider that the small font was likely to discourage readers, especially older readers who might be its most engaged audience?

When I later compared the paperback to the larger-dimensioned hardcover from the library, I found page numbers and word locations to be identical (e.g., Chapter VIII in both books starts on page 217 and the final word in the lower righthanded corner of that page is “Mont-”). The smaller paperback was thus a miniaturized copy of its hardcover parent.

Despite this, I forged ahead, but had recurrent urges to give up, to place it back in my bookcase, to select something more comfortable—a collection of essays perhaps, a biography or memoir—anything having normal-sized font. I wished the publishers had heeded E.B. White’s counsel to writers in The Elements of Style—“It is now necessary to warn the writer that his concern for the reader must be pure: he must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time)...”

During graduate school, my class participation hinged on the scribblings I made in my books—the underlines and checkmarks, the side notes. They were my prompts and reminders, helping me avoid the chill I felt when a professor asked for a description of the reading. No matter how intensely I’d prepared, no matter how deeply I’d understood the material at the time of my reading, without my scribblings, sometimes my mind went blank. Especially if there had been a sizable gap in time between my reading and class. Because I had trouble enough remembering what I had to remember from the books that had been assigned, I was hesitant to read anything outside the curriculum. This didn’t stop me, however, from browsing bookstores and purchasing books for later, for when I’d be finished with school, finally.

So when I graduated in December, I was a reader unleashed. I began reorganizing my bookcase and was excited to have such a fine collection of unread books. I vowed to challenge King’s annual eighty. And I started well, completing three books by January thirteenth, all nonfiction: Invisible Child (Journalism—Andrea Elliot), The Deep Places (Memoir—Ross Douthat), and Unthinkable (Memoir—Jamie Raskin). For my fourth, fifth, and sixth, I fashioned a Francine Prose trilogy—Reading Like a Writer, Anne Frank (The book, the life, the afterlife), and What To Read and Why. I’d read and admired Prose’s novel Goldengrove, and appreciated her interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where she told of her reluctance to write negative book reviews, since writing is so difficult. She sounded warm and intelligent and knowledgeable about the literary world.

It was disappointing then that I didn’t connect with Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Most of her commentary was about books I hadn’t read, and many of those she referenced were literary fiction, not my favorite genre. If I failed to understand a passage, I didn’t double back. I wasn’t interested enough in what I was reading. Plus, since it wasn’t an assignment for which I was accountable, I didn’t stop and study difficult passages. I therefore found myself mouthing through most of the book, telling myself that this was better than giving up completely. I thought I’d come across latter portions I could better relate to, but this happened rarely. I ended up scanning, mindlessly, in order to deem the book “read.”

I got back on track with Anne Frank (The book, the life, the afterlife), which I found magnificent. Not wanting to miss a single word, I read it like I was in school—slowly, assiduously, marking important passages, rereading tough sections, searching outside references. Anne Frank, her family and friends, became so vivid in my mind that when I finished, I didn’t want to leave. I even purchased a television documentary about Anne Frank that Prose had mentioned—Anne Frank Remembered (1995). When it showed a fleeting video clip of Anne observing a street event from a second floor window, turning back to smile at someone behind her but out of our view—possibly her parents—I found it deeply moving.

Unfortunately, Prose’s third book—What To Read and Why—hit me like her Reading Like A Writer had, and I slid back into skimming and bypassing much of what she had written.

Thank goodness the next two books were memoirs: Pack of Two (Caroline Knapp) and Let’s Take The Long Way Home (Gail Caldwell). For my ninth book of the year, I selected a Booker Prize winning novel—Lincoln in The Bardo—by an author I’d encountered at a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts: George Saunders. (The previous summer I’d also read his Tenth of December and A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, the latter becoming an all-time favorite.)

I started Lincoln in The Bardo but immediately hit a wall. I could visualize the scenes in the graveyard of Lincoln and his deceased son’s (Willie’s) spirit, but found the graveyard ghosts baffling. I again refused to slow down or reread sections and didn’t take the time to search outside references for help with my understanding.

When I mentioned the book to a friend, she said she’d read it and “what a sad story” it was. I nodded in agreement, but felt like a fraud. My reading at this point was little better than a computer program reciting text in monotone, with minimal inflection, and little understanding or appreciation of the story being told. Lincoln in the Bardo become another deceitful notch on my annual list of books read.

The next four books—two memoirs, a collection of poetry, a collection of essays—went down easily. Then, on March 3rd, I started Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. I knew that if I wanted to read it well, I’d have to proceed slowly, laboriously, and worried that this slower pace could end up hurting my annual total, a thought that upset me.  What the hell was I doing?

I turned back to Stephen King: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others; read a lot and write a lot.” I was indeed reading a lot but also was skimming a lot, which hardly counted as reading. Reading was becoming a drudgery, giving me a pain in my gut. I found myself dreading picking up a book, which was a big deal because throughout my life reading books had been one of my most treasured activities. What made things even worse was the fact that, in my fanatical quest for large numbers, I had set my writing aside.

I came across a couple of sentences in King’s On Writing that I’d missed on my first pass-through: “I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair.” (This might not work so well for me though. Imagining myself at night in my cushy chair with my feet up like King’s, all I can see is myself in deep sleep).

King continues: “Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

I’d always loved reading books, especially in genres I felt most at home with—essays, biographies, memoirs, journalism, history. In the past, if I decided to read something I found challenging, like a book of short stories or a novel or anything else I had trouble relating to, I took as much time as I needed, and marked up the text, and sought out references, and made notes. In other words, I read them like a student. And, with rare exceptions, what began as a struggle ended up becoming a source of satisfaction. Much of my recent reading had been lacking that commitment. I hadn’t been willing to do the work needed when sentences and stories didn’t flow effortlessly into my brain. Consequently, difficult reads became a waste of my time.

I became determined to work my way through Slavery By Another Name, deciding to bypass the text size issue by shelving the paperback and downloading the digital book to my iPad, adjusting the font to my liking. I read slowly and attentively, highlighting important passages—not as satisfying to me as pencil on page—and making liberal use of the iBooks’ search functionality. I gave this difficult book the read it deserved.

Blackmon’s research uncovered numerous examples of what he termed “neoslavery,” perpetuated in the South against African Americans following the Civil War:

“Tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the cost of their own arrests … prisoners were sold as forced labor to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude … Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery” (–from the book jacket)

In the book’s epilogue, Blackmon writes: “Slavery, real slavery, didn’t end until 1945… “We should rename this era of American history known as the time of ‘Jim Crow segregation’… let us define this period of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was the Age of Neoslavery.” (pp. 402)

I proudly added Slavery By Another Name to my list of books read.

Sometimes, rather than slavishly working through a book, it’s best to just shelve it and move on. That’s what British writer Ruth Ware suggests in her July 21, 2022 New York Times By-The-Book interview. She was asked if she remembered the last book she put down without finishing:

“I abandon books all the time. I won’t name them because that feels like tacitly implying it’s the fault of the book, and 99 times out of 100 it’s not — it’s just not the right book for me in that moment. I sometimes get tweeted by people who are not enjoying my books but are forcing themselves on, and I always want to say, don’t! I give you permission to stop! It’s very strange; we don’t feel bad about turning off the TV if we’re not enjoying a show, but books are too often still treated like medicine. You’ve got to finish the course, even if you’re not enjoying it. I don’t think books should be anything other than enriching. That doesn’t always mean fun, or easy reads — sometimes a book is upsetting or challenging or difficult to read. But if you’re not getting anything out of a book, I think you should absolutely feel free to drop it and walk away.”

I like that, giving myself permission to stop (as long as it’s not an assignment, of course). I also relate to the idea of something “not being the right book for me in that moment.” Several years ago I purchased an out-of-print work of literary fiction, The Wayward Pilgrims, by Gerald Warner Brace, published in 1938. I’d come across a photo of it being read by my grandmother, my father’s mother, and thought it might be something I could share with this woman I’d heard so much about, who had died before my birth. I got through the first thirty pages, but its slow progression and incessant banter between the two main characters caused me to shelve it.

Then, a few years later, when writing an essay about her, I returned to The Wayward Pilgrims and found its story—a single man learns about life and love from an experienced, married woman—interesting and warm-hearted. I also found the book’s slow movement to be calming. The man and his companion walk the roads of picturesque Vermont, sharing their lives and joys, and I was right there with them, and sharing the experience of reading a book that my grandmother had once read.

Then there’s the issue of respect, for the writer, and for the reader. Essayist Scott Russell Sanders, in “A Writer’s Calling,” talks about the labor he put into writing the piece:

“I have spent a month of mornings writing this essay. This does not guarantee that the result is worth a reader’s attention, but it does guarantee that every word has been considered and reconsidered, every sentence has been sounded again and again on the ear, every idea has been carefully tested. Making such an effort in the age of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram might seem quaint, like building a Shaker chair by hand in the age of mass-produced La-Z-Boy recliners. But much of the appeal of writing, for me, is precisely this handmade quality, this refusal of haste. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and mystic, remarked that ‘the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.’ I don’t believe in angels, but I agree with the sentiment. To make a work of art ought to be an act of deep respect—toward the material, the craft, and the persons whom it will serve.”

Writers show respect to their readers by making sure the writing is the best it can be.

Sanders’ makes me consider the importance of giving a writer my reader’s respect, by striving to understand and consider what the author has written. This doesn’t mean that I’ve “got to finish the course, even if [I’m] not enjoying it.” In fact, forcing myself through a reading I don’t find enriching may be less respectful to the writer than leaving it be.

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Joseph O’Day’s writing has appeared in Spry Literary Journal, The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture, bioStories, Patchwork Lit Mag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag, The Salem News, The American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, and Focus on Faulkner. He received his MA in English (Creative Writing) from Salem State University and served as Nonfiction Editor of Soundings East, Salem State’s literary journal. He was the Director of Pharmacy at Brigham and Woman’s Faulkner Hospital for many years until his retirement.

You can find him on Facebook @joseph.oday.37 and on X @Joe@twitj