The Short, Unhappy Life of My Reckless Reading Habits

This is not a rant against social media or any other content, whether in or out of the mainstream. Rather, I’ve come to realize that most of what I’ve been reading makes me either bored or unhappy. That’s completely my fault as there is no shortage of available reading material that could make me happy and spark valuable thoughts.

For me, reading material dealing with the “news,” defined as a recent event, quickly becomes stale and repetitive. Sadly, that’s what seems to occupy much of my reading time. This morning I read Bret Stephen’s column in the Times, “Five Blunt Truths About the War In Ukraine,”  Stephens is one of my favorites, and I read his columns out of habit.

The conclusion of his column today: “The bottom line: The war in Ukraine is either a prelude or a finale. President Biden needs to do even more than he already has to ensure it’s the latter.”

The column’s title should have warned me away . Yet another piece about the uncertainty of how the war in Ukraine will end. Predictably, the column only made me angry and sad about the daily destruction of a war I consider an unnecessary error.

One more example, this time, where at the last moment I spun away like a matador (let me have my fantasies!) from a piece of writing that I knew would upset me. Jennifer Senor is a feature writer for The Atlantic. I’m a fan, having read Senor’s Pulitzer winning article about the differing paths of grief taken by the family of Bobby McIlvaine, a 9/11 victim. It was a beautiful piece of writing. Reading it made me understand better my own path of grief over the somewhat recent and untimely loss of my mother.

The Senor piece I dodged was a long article about Steve Bannon titled “The American Rasputin.” I’m sure it’s excellently written, but I knew reading it would provoke great anger at Bannon as well as further worry about how he and his allies might corrupt the 2024 election. What good would it do to put myself through that angst? Once on edge, I might go through my day with less compassion, less desire to do good. Bannon is one of the last people I want in my head!

So, if I’m to be more intentional and discerning about my reading, and if I don’t plan to reduce my reading time, what will I substitute for the reading I turn away from?

Yesterday was a rare reading day for me. It began with an email proclaiming the birth of two adorable twin daughters to one of my favorite people. The news and the pictures of the newborns made me joyful for the parents. And it made me hopeful, too, as I considered all the wonderful possibilities of what these two girls might grow up to do.

I ended my reading day with another email, this time a moving and beautifully crafted tribute by a loving niece to an uncle who had passed away. I commented, “Sad, yes, that he is gone, but inspiring to hear about who he was and what he did.” The inspiration of the tribute has stayed with me. It resonated.

Receiving those two emails, so powerfully evocative of positive feelings, helped me realize that, just as I try to surround myself with people who will bring out the best in me, I ought to do the same with my reading.

So, I thought about what kind of reading material brings out the best in me. What makes me happy, what makes me laugh, what contains observations that will ignite further thought, and what will offer an occasional sentence that will send a shiver of pleasure up my spine? At the suggestion of an “internet friend,” I decided to plunge back into a familiar literary world that satisfies all those criteria–––“A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell. It’s twelve linked novels, 3,000 pages in length, narrated as an “autobiography” by the fictional Nick Jenkins as he looks back on his life in England from the 1920s to the early 1970s.

I started it yesterday, and already, just first sixty pages in, I feel as if I’m back at home in a friendly place with old friends who can make me laugh. ”Dance” carries me along with writing that is clear, inventive, and charming.

As for the writer’s observations, I encountered on page 36 the following sentence regarding the main character Nick’s reminiscence about his two closest adolescent friends at their British boarding school: “Even now it seems to me that I spent a large proportion of my life in their close company, although the time we were all three together was less than eighteen months.”

I’d missed that sentence on my first reading years ago. I’ve now underlined it so I won’t miss it the next time I pass through.

That observation struck home. I’ve had periods of time in my life that seem far longer than the mechanics of calendars would suggest. And those same periods (e.g., the week I met my future wife) were also so disproportionately influential and formative that my memory of them looms at a great height and clarity of detail, like seeing the snow on a faraway mountain peak on a perfectly clear day.

Everyone has different reading tastes, so I’m not suggesting that others will share my criteria for what makes the best reading or that anyone will or should share my fondness for any particular book or author.

I do, however, want to share my “aha!” moment about my reading choice process. It seems absurd to admit, but it’s true. I have been devoting a large chunk of time to reading whatever happens to come within my field of vision rather than being intentional or thoughtful or discriminating about choosing what to read. In a word, reckless.