Here’s a rant I’ve been meaning to have for quite some time. Getting it off my chest will probably do me some good, but I can’t speak for anyone else.Okay. I have too much to read. In fact, I have so much to read that I find it hard to settle into reading anything at all. Despite this, I’m actually a constant reader – books, newspapers, magazines, letters, web pages, blog posts, comment boxes, e-mails, texts, tweets, screen crawls, signage, billboards, labels, cereal boxes. So I suppose it’s a question of the quality of that reading. But with a thoroughly modern attention span – fragmented, obliterated, atomized – can there even be any quality to one’s reading? And if so, what is the measure of it?
Finishing something?
That rarely happens anymore. I’m usually up for finishing a tweet alright, or a text message, but with newspaper and magazine articles the penultimate and final paragraphs frequently go unread, assuming I even get that far. As for books, forget about it. Many are abandoned after a few pages, or a couple of chapters. A completed book is a rare occurrence these days – an occasion for celebration. But any sense of pride I might feel in the achievement quickly turns to dust as the absurdity of what I’m celebrating hits home. I’m probably reading about fifteen to twenty books at the moment, concurrently, and only Charles Darwin knows which ones I’ll finish. They’re all over my house, in different rooms, on different surfaces, each with a hopeful little bookmark in it. Depending on circumstances, or mood, I might snatch a paragraph or two from one of them and then put it back, wistfully thinking how in an ideal world I’d have enough time and energy to read on until I reached the last page.
Retention of information?
I have no idea how much I retain of anything I read. Because this is rarely, if ever, put to the test. Quite simply, I don’t know what I know. I receive information from so many different sources that it’s hard to sort it all out. There’s no filtering process, no mechanism for grading or prioritizing. If I’m reading this, say, I stop and think to myself, why am I not reading that? And I have no answer. I could drill down and spend a few hours reading in great detail about Italian terrorism in the 1970s, or I could dip into those P. G. Wodehouse stories I’ve been meaning to re-visit for years. I could start the biography of Walter Winchell I got a while back. Or what about that new study on Big Data I’ve been threatening to download? Threatening myself. But does it matter? No one person can ever again be what was once called “well-read”, in the sense that they’ve read all of the books that matter. Those days are over. There’s no shame anymore in not having read a classic such as Middlemarch or The Golden Bowl, or even The Catcher in the Rye. And if you’re in your teens now and starting out on your reading career, you have nearly forty more years of books to get through than I had when I was that age – all those literary bricks, all those multi-volume biographies, all those great crime titles. To say nothing of the graphic novels, the memoirs, and the endless acres of “must read” journalism.Good luck with that.
Pleasure?
I remember the pleasure, which used to be constant. But now it’s all fraught with anxiety. Thomas Pynchon’s eleven-hundred-page Against the Day, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Ian Kershaw’s Hitler and a sparkly new paperback edition of The King James Bible all look down at me from the shelves they occupy, thinking to themselves, This guy isn’t ever going to read us, is he? On my web browser there’s a read-later feature where I have about two hundred articles stored, stuff ranging from detailed critiques of austerity to advice pieces on lifehacking. Don’t ask. On my iPad Kindle I have maybe thirty books I have yet to read. A lot of my unread material is for research purposes. Supposedly. When I’m writing a novel, I’ll routinely spend a fortune getting books I’ve convinced myself I need – books without which I’ll be unable to proceed. But then I don’t open them, don’t bother to crack their spines, the logic seeming to be, I bought the damned things, now I actually have to read them, too? So a lot of the pleasure has been squeezed out of it for me. Browsing in bookshops, for example – that used to be a big part of the experience, but now I’ll often stand in a bookshop, glance around and think, I could go pound for pound with this place.
And I have my own coffee machine.
So what’s the problem?I suppose it’s too easy to blame it on having kids. Life does fragment into a thousand little shards of responsibility when you become a parent – there’s always stuff to do, and interruption is your only constant – but it’s not exactly some new craze, is it, having kids? The other easy target is digitization – the move away from paper, from the physical book, from the fully engaged. Everything is on a screen now, but the very definition of what a screen is – its size, its function, its location even – is up for grabs, is ever-shifting. As a result, the reading experience has become fragmented, a sub-set of the digital experience – an arrow in its quiver, rather than the whole hand-stitched, tanned-leather, jewel-encrusted quiver itself. Look at the notion of interactive fiction apps, where you get to determine the outcome of the story, or the order in which you read the chapters (if that’s what they’re still called). But are you readinghere, or playing a game? Either way, I don’t like it that the illusion of choice this seems to impart is something I had no choice in creating to begin with.
The digitization argument is basically that the internet has rewired my brain and I’d better get used to it. But let’s face it, the internet hasn’t rewired my brain. Maybe I just have ADD or something. I don’t know, you know, who knows? Because . . .
Look, take my wife. No, please. (As Henny Youngman used to say). She has the same kids I have, and lives in the same digital world I live in, and is, hands down, busier than I am – but she still manages to read about three books a week. Books made of paper. She starts one, reads it right through to the end, and then starts another one. This is radical to me, hardcore, almost unimaginable.
So what is it? A male/female thing? One more telling example of how quintessentially infantile we blokes really are? It could be. But I don’t buy that either.
So what is it?
Maybe this isn’t a rant after all. Maybe it’s just a confession. To wit, I’m simply blinded by choice. I can’t make up my mind what to read because there’s so fucking MUCH to read and I want to read ALL of it – every new literary novel, every new genre title, every new biography that nails its subject like no one’s ever done before, every new popular science book that effortlessly shifts a paradigm or two, every compelling longform piece of journalism, every blog post that illuminates that day’s sky (along with every measured or mealy-minded comment in the box that follows it) . . . every e-mail, and yes, even every goddamned tweet (especially the ones containing links to whole NEW worlds of wonder and horror and opinion and . . .)
But clearly, this isn’t possible. It wouldn’t even be possible if I could speed-read, which I can’t. Or was on special medication (MDT-48, please), which I’m not. So what tends to happen, I think, is that this glorious superabundance of information and content gradually blurs, and loses definition. I know that the concept of entropy in physics is very complicated and that its use as a metaphor is probably galling to scientists. But fuck ‘em. That’s what this is. Entropy. The point at which all data reaches thermodynamic equilibrium - the heat death of what we know and understand., that moment when a single mouse click can take you either to Syria or to Beyonce . . .
Oh look, here we are at the penultimate paragraph – which, if this were a piece written by someone other than me – I most likely wouldn’t even be reading now.
Are you?