How you should read

(Articles that promise to tell you how to do something 'correctly' get lots of clicks)

You should read old books, wrote the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh in a column called ‘What and how to read’ earlier this month.

Books about books. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

‘Given our finite lives,’ he wrote, ‘and the centuries-deep canon of literature, what logic is there in reading something current? More than 120mn unique titles have been published since the dawn of the printing press. What are the odds that one written in 2024 deserves our limited time?’

I begged to differ, as I was reading his words. What about authors you admire who have a new book out, Janan? And what would happen to publishing if people only read old books?

Ganesh’s answer to me (he wrote something, I begged to differ, he answered me – that we live in different hemispheres and don’t know one another is part of the magic of conversations that happen in the act of reading), was 'If pragmatic exceptions are made here and there, Schopenhauer’s reading advice (“avoid whatever is making a great commotion”) is right.’

Ah yes, I thought. Pragmatic exceptions.

I turned to Schopenhauer to include him in our not-real conversation and said ‘I know, Schopenhauer! I couldn’t agree more and I wish I’d followed this advice against my better instinct when I wasted my finite life on Where the Crawdads Sing a few years ago.

I carried on reading the column to get to Ganesh’s other rules about reading.

‘Don’t read fewer than 50 pages in one sitting. The cost of pecking at a book here and there is a lost sense of narrative wholeness.’

Nice verb – ‘pecking at a book’ – I said to my non-friend Janan. I said the image of a harassed, harried chicken endlessly pecking nervously at the ground conveyed exactly what I think it meant to convey. How do you ‘fill up’ when you’re pecking and stalking and chipping your head with its chicken eyes around all the time to see what else is going on instead of letting yourself sink into the ground of a story?

But hang on. Fifty pages is quite a lot. I know, because I read for a living and I know how much time it takes to read. Fifty pages take quite a chunk of time. Also, I’m reading a book at the moment that has maybe two paragraphs per page, and it is dense, lyrical, intense and tightly woven, and I can’t read more than two pages without something sparking like an overheating plug in my brain.

‘And,’ I said to Janan, ‘you’re being very prescriptive. I like these ideas, but you present them as though there is only one way to read – your way. I know that’s what columnists do: they present in absolutes, because then you get readers, people like me say, to argue with you in their heads. But let’s make some room for differing needs, when it comes to reading.’

Is what I said to Janan in my head.

Just two weeks ago, when someone found out what I did for a living, they started to tell me what they were reading and then interrupted themselves to apologise to me that they don’t read literature.

People often apologise to me about what they read. I am short and currently quite podgy. I am past my prime (or the received wisdom of what ‘prime’ means) and smile way more than is necessary, so I can see why they would fear me. I must look like I go around punching people who don’t read like I do.

Should you read only for edification and learning? For being able to say you read only serious work by serious writers?

Virginia Woolf, who was very serious about reading, said no. ‘One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power.’

I imagine Ganesh reads also for fun and rest and oddity, but I wonder whether he doesn’t also peck around sometimes. Not at novels. He’s so right there: I certainly can’t sustain a story, no matter how well written, if I don’t read a bit of it every day.

But what about other stuff? I peck around on the net. I peck at my bookshelves when I have a sudden urge to find something I once read. I peck at a lot of non-fiction. I peck at old poetry books I’ve read often. I page through picture books with zero purpose in mind, and chicken-peck at captions and the odd descriptive paragraph.

I spent half an hour this past Sunday tidying away books and magazines and newspapers I’ve been pecking at in a very satisfying way for the past two or three weeks.

Woolf again: ‘To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.’

She says: ‘All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books – that is to say, works of pure imagination.’

Don’t you love how she both promotes the reading of anything not of ‘pure imagination’ and then dismisses all non-novels as not ‘real books’?

When it comes to reading for leisure or pleasure, I don’t care if people read thrillers or romance or sci-fi, or only books published this year, or only Booker Prize shortlist books, or only Harlan Coben books.

The only people I always feel a tiny bit sad for are those who never read ‘real books’ (as per Woolf’s definition) and limit themselves only to non-fiction that teaches or informs. But still, I wouldn’t punch them.

The writer Hilary Mantel said something deliciously rude about people who say they don’t read fiction: ‘Show me a man – it’s usually a man – who “doesn’t see the point of fiction”, and I’ll show you a pompous, inflexible, self-absorbed bore.’

And I won’t punch you, Janan, because I like your columns and the fact that they sometimes make me argue with you, and with myself.

In fact, I’m unlikely to ever punch anyone.

Because I’m a reader and my hands are busy holding open a book.

---

If you’d like to investigate some of the writing that inspired this Love Letter, here are links

What and how to read by Janan Ganesh (you’ll need a subscription, but if you’re desperate, I scanned the article when I read it in the actual newspaper made of actual paper, so ask and we will deal illicitly in old-fashioned clippings)

How should one read a book? by Virginia Woolf

Real books in imaginary houses by Hilary Mantel

The reason I intensely disliked Where the Crawdads Sing is recorded here.

If you have strong feelings about how one should read, please let me know in the comments below. I won’t punch you.

Love,

K.