On my nightstand is a small stack of books. Before I go to bed, I can open one of the books and get transported to another world.
That’s what I like to tell myself.
The truth is, 5 out of 7 nights, I browse the news on my iPhone: pop culture from Gawker, world news from the NYTimes, and sports news from my fan sites. I already read those sites earlier in the day. I’m efficient at wasting time. I scan and scan for stories that I haven’t read, picking over the leftover titles that didn’t captivate me before. Empty literary calories. I’m an addict.
The books are left unread.
India: a Portrait was an on-the-whim find at an estate sale. When I backpacked through Asia in my twenties, I devoured everything I could regarding the subcontinent. For me, India was this huge cultural counterbalance to the Sino-infused background that I was familiar with. And India’s influence on the world that I traveled through was intense and pervasive.
I’ve finished 6 chapters of the book, and now find myself nodding through every few passages about the Congress government.
I picked up The Sympathizer at Bird & Beckett, a local bookstore. Based on the NYTimes’ review and the Facebook chatter of smart Asian-American friends, I had pegged this as my next book purchase. When I find myself in a bookstore, rational thought disappears. I can read everything! Buy all the books! I have interests to explore!
I haven’t started reading yet .
Travels with a Tangerine is illuminating writing about the explorations of Ibn Battutah in the 14th century. Travel writing is my comfort-food reading. I was briefly a travel writer, and the combination of historical and geographical discovery is my literary honeypot. I found the book from reading about “The Chinese through Abbasid Eyes” as part of my ongoing interest about the Silk Road.
I’m a few chapters away from finishing the book, but I have been stuck on the same pages for a few months now.I’ve been reading Blow Up a few pages at a time. My friend Roberto gave me Blow Up when he heard I was into Cortazar. I was at a bar in the Mission, and he walks in with the book as a gift. It’s the second book that he has given me — a weird and lovely off-the-cuff sentiment, as if book-giving and reading for pleasure and talking about books are normal considerations in this tech-addled world.
The book is a series of surreal and fantastic short stories, just like our interactions. I have to stop after each story because they cause my imagination to run amok in my dreams.
Each of the books are important to me on personal level, but they always surrender to the superficial attractions of my phone’s screen. My attention is limited to scanning 500 words articles, if at that. The part of my brain that used to perk up at the scent for symbolism, metaphors, foreshadowing and other object-references would rather go to sleep — or open a game on my phone that hits me with dopamine treat for two minutes.
I’m a horizontal reader now, a bundle of quick-twitch muscles eager to tap on any link that leads me down a rabbit hole of trivia and facts, none of which makes me smarter — only more informed.
I haven’t finished a book in a long time. I start and stop. When I pick them up again, I have forgotten what I’ve read. I have book-deja-vu a lot. I find myself reading a familiar passage only to remember that I had read the same words a few months prior.
I read somewhere that the smartest and ablest people read a whole lot. The smartest people I know create products to dissuade me from reading a whole lot. My world is filled with listicles, diuretic tweets, shallow microposts, mobile-friendly but insight-unfriendly articles, and an ever increasing avalanche of incendiary and lowest-common-denominator content shared at the top of the Facebook heap. In best cases, there are the Medium links thrown willy nilly into my Twitter stream.
Medium attempts to solve only a slice of the problem. The problem is that I don’t read the dense kind of reading that activates my sedated brain. I don’t read things that allow ideas to simmer. I don’t read content that makes subconscious connections.
I don’t read books enough. I want to read books, because they give me broader insights — philosophical and existential — than any other format.
Books have failed in the world of fast and free information. They lose out against online world governed by advertising or social/self-promotion paradigms. Books operate on intervals of weeks and months. My reading patterns cycle through chunks of minutes.
I don’t know if the way my brain works has changed because the things I read have changed. I don’t know if my little problem is a solvable or worthwhile problem.
I do know that I enjoy reading books on the rare occasion when I can read a good 50–100 pages in one go. I do know that books provide my brain with sustenance unlike what’s available online. I do know that my brain stretches and struggle delightfully when I get into a good book. I do know that the stack of books by my bedside continues to grow, unfinished.