On longer reading

It's good for us

The best doorstop ever

TL;DR: losing your ability to read with commitment is worth resisting. Especially when the ‘reading’ we often default to is doing us no good at all.

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Everyone knows that snacking on the bitesize content forms served up by the Twitters, TikToks and myriad other scrollfests is doing something to us.

So we tell ourselves stories about how it's just a bit of diverting fun or that we're finding Things that are Interesting or that we're merely filling the unforgiving moment.

Articles are often written by intelligent people, justifying their addiction to Twitter, explaining how to avoid falling into the doomscroll habit and how they like it because you find cool/niche experts you might miss otherwise. But ask yourself this.

That tweet you saw a few weeks ago that really had you punching the air because it was so en pointe? Come on, you must remember it. You shared it and then sent it to friends who wouldn't have seen it because they were doing something else when it flickered onto your device. You must remember it. No? Really?

That day when you spent maybe a combined two hours or more, scrolling and scrolling, swiping to refresh the feed, tippy-tapping on a piece of glass with your acerbic rejoinders to a politician who never saw your acerbic rejoinders, remember that? No?

<Cinematic shimmer effect>

Remember that time you became so absorbed in the conversation between Gately and the wraith that you went back from your lunch break 30 minutes late? Yes? Of course you do. Can you still feel the pain of Gately's festering gunshot wound? Obviously, yes.

Remember where you were when you read through the encounter in the park between Octavio Paz and Ulises Lima and how the sun was beating down on you even though it felt like it was probably more stiflingly overcast in the story? You do? Of course you do.

Can you still contact the feeling you had all the way through 2666? That's easy.

Or Waterland? What? That was more than 40 years ago. But, of course you can.

Those things partly made you.

The other things, that swept by, causing you to react, move on, react, move on, react (ad infinitum) used you.

People say that social media is conversational. Didn't Twitter have 'join the conversation' as a strapline? Maybe it still does. They never say that you're joining a conversation with print forms in which you can't write snotty replies or ‘react’ in some way. Even though, as clever science types have established, your brain acts as if you are.

The reason for this welter is a realisation.

Lately I've been reading some things that took several hours to read and noticing that I had unawarely become incapable of this until recently. One was NS Lyons' in The Upheaval meditating on Tolkien, CS Lewis and the direction of liberal modernity and another has been Paul Kingsnorth's The Abbey of Misrule series on, ah yes, the direction of liberal modernity.

If there's a relationship between snacking on bitesize content and deeper reading, in my case they seem mutually exclusive. Without really noticing, I had lost the ability to focus on reading one thing for longer than maybe 15 minutes. Things that I did try to read felt hard if they weren't going to end soon, with all the arguments and conclusions neatly tied up. This was especially true if it involved unfamiliar framings, even on familiar issues.

The sense I have is that this ability to read once more may have arrested a certain cognitive decline. Which is reassuring for someone who fears that above all else.

But it's also led to some other things, which fall under the broad heading of wellbeing.

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So here's a bold claim. Maybe reading some of the Russian classics over the past 12 months was possibly helping to attenuate some inevitable age-related cognitive tiredness and prising open some perceptual doors.

One reason is that it seems to have helped me to better notice and consider the threads and currents in modern sociocultural strangeness. Allowing for nuance and complexity has become less stressful and much more interesting.

In case you care, the books are Life And Fate, Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. Cancer Ward is up next.

Only Life And Fate, chronicling the horrors of political correctness, has the kind of obvious salience you can map directly on to the seismic cultural disturbance of our current moment. The others are more general explorations of banal human nature and how confused we become about desires, whether and how we should pursue them or find other things to focus on. Which turns out to be what Rarely Certain is mostly about.

In each case, those books have been like a therapist inviting less reaction and more reflection.

Being buffeted less by bite-size rhetoric or diversion and instead immersing in complex webs of narrative, motivation and outcome is calming, rewarding and nourishing. Life And Fate in particular also felt inspiring at a time when I wasn't sure whether to continue this newsletter, because I worried about potential personal costs arising from the explicit rejection of emerging cultural norms that threaten to crush our individual humanity. It told me that it's better to be potentially wrong and real than a cheap cut-out fractal representation of the times.

What's going on with that?

There's a dialectical process between you and the author in long reading that leads to spontaneously arising ideas, self-examination, reframings or more nuanced appraisals of common situations which is entirely absent in the grazing of popularly palatable think pieces or tweets which merely spark a visceral momentary hard agree/disagree moment of arousal or just hijack your attention for a few seconds.

In this way long reading encourages abstract thought rather than linear Flattened Problem demands Essentialising Solution Right Now cognitive short-cutting. It helps you to think about the why and not just the what.

Why it matters.

Cognitive evolutionary science talks about a 'novelty bias' built into us. Our brains were originally wired to pay attention to the minutest of changes in the environment, even while sleeping. It’s among the reasons why our species was so successful at avoiding predation and finding food or shelter.

Then along came tech platforms designed to exploit novelty bias, so we end up constantly scrolling without really knowing what we're scrolling for. It's like sitting in the entrance to the cave being hyper alert. All the time.

The brain is a massive consumer of energy and switching attention all the time uses even more energy than focusing on one thing. In my Twitter days I sometimes noticed a feeling of weariness even when the timeline was filled with fun and curiosity. That scrolling was not nutritious. It was a net consumer of energy rather than the energising inspiration I mistakenly believed it to be. That's one of the reasons I deactivated my Twitter altogether a few weeks ago.

We're overloaded without noticing.

A couple of times, back when I was regularly working in London, I tried an experiment. From the moment I left the flat I tried to count how many times my attention was hijacked by a message that someone wanted me to absorb; instructions, warnings, adverts, slogans, even graffiti. Both times I gave up within minutes because the welter of 'information' was impossible to consciously track. So I tried instead to avoid seeing it altogether. Try this yourself and prepare to be bemused at how strange and difficult it is.

At this point, tradition dictates that I list various investigations into the massive increase in data our brains are processing today, compared to a few decades ago. Which is an ironic step too far here. Take my word that information overload is even worse than you probably thought and stick with this article until the end.

How often do you read an article in the Z or F pattern? Don't know? Try not looking that up if the concept is novel to you. I mentioned it to evidence how hard it is to avoid distraction. It's hard, for evolutionary reasons.

Don't just read books. Give up your playlists too.

Reading books or long, involved, carefully constructed feature pieces, feels quite similar to listening to albums. Which is harder but perversely also less tiring than snacking through a favourites playlist. I can only guess that this is because it is immersive, not just involving, and therefore forces you to exclude the distractions we're addicted to. This is perhaps why I will often write while listening to music - but only in the form it was intended to be heard, rather than skipping from one favoured track to another. Right now I'm listening to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and it complements the process rather than distracting from it.

There's a paradox right there. Writing about how paying close attention to one substantial thing is better than constantly dividing your attention between multiple things while dividing my own attention between what I'm writing on this screen and the sound of freeform jazz across the room.

Perhaps control comes into this. You give up control when you read a book and instead put yourself into the mind of another. Similarly when you listen to an album. The artist made it this way and you aren't imposing your will against the work they did. Giving up control (as many BDSM practitioners will explain) can be liberating and energising.¹

Conversely - and perhaps I'm wrong in this intuition - we think that we're more in control when we are scrolling around or skim-reading while really we are being jerked around by the medium. Becoming absorbed in the flow of 'long form' reading (as many research sources suggested as I dug around the internet for stuff about this) helps with all these good things

• Being less afraid of uncertainty and complexity

• Empathy

• Imagination and creativity

• General intelligence, pattern/connection recognition

• Tolerance

• Memory

• Interpersonal relating

• Stress

• Sleep

Maybe I've been lucky to have had a mother who encouraged me to read earlier than most of my peers. I was 8 or 9 when I gave up on the children's fiction in the library to read things like The Day of the Triffids instead.

Perhaps it's also luck to be dispositionally fond of looking beyond the surface of things to see patterns or other meanings, which is how most 'good' fiction works. And to love stories more than 'facts' about the world. Lucky too to have believed, long ago, that people would be impressed if you could talk about 'good' fiction. I wrote a song about that, once.²

For a long time it seemed that cultural capital was mostly accumulated by consuming literature, music and art (before that was superseded by having the right beliefs). It still paid social and professional dividends at various times when being excellent at maths or tennis might have just seemed kind of meh.

Feeling absorbed by someone else's mind for an extended period is a nice way to step off the treadmill of attention demanded by ever-changing screens. Reflecting on how they're making you feel over time, rather than viscerally reacting to the latest optimised-for-anger snippet, also encourages better understanding of your own lines of thought rather than reflexive wall-building around your precepts.

Some of the biggest life puzzles arise from fiction. A personal struggle at the moment is to make sense of my love for the future world depicted in Iain Banks's Culture novel series while feeling extremely sceptical about the implementation of its beginnings during my actual lifetime. Still Working On That.³

Reading in a deeply absorbing mode is something you can do for good reasons (to feed the imagination, consider new perspectives, be cleverly entertained) or bad reasons (to impress people) and it's still a nourishing thing to do.

It's also potentially an investment for a future in which your body will finally let you down. Exercise for a mind that tends to otherwise close and circle its wagons around what we always thought as we become ever more vulnerable to irrelevance in our physical form.

You'll remember your favourite book, if you think about it on the proverbial deathbed. You won't remember your favourite tweet, YouTube clip, TikTok, FB status update or snippet from whatever algorithmic or social graph-driven platform gets invented next year. That's the clincher, for me, on measuring dwindling time well spent.⁴

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Here’s the thread for introducing yourself to me and other readers.

And yes, Chat is now enabled around here.

1. A fun way to give up control is committing to read or listen to things chosen by a trusted advisor. I did this in one workplace by spending an entire year reading only what an avid reader colleague suggested. I have him to thank for getting me to finally read Infinite Jest.

2. It was a thrashy guitar pop song about hoping for girls at my school to think I was kissably cool for being into Albert Camus. They didn't. The lyric that celebrates this cruel life lesson was

I read clever books

But they never give me second looks

3. If you recognised this as a made up Culture ship name, please enjoy feeling smug and tell me yours in the Chat.

4. But still, something is lost even now, here. My memories of books once hefted in hand, with their attractive covers and comforting smells, are orders of magnitude more vivid than those I've since read on Kindle. Screens are bad for us and the machine will always win against the lazy and weak-willed.