How not to read in straight lines
What to do when reading becomes a bore
I’d become conservative in my reading choices. I only read books by authors I already know and like, in specific genres that I am most attracted by or books recommended by people whose tastes I trust.
This is enough to ensure I have a steady stream of books to read. But it still leaves me a little bored at times, it still leaves me with passages of time, weeks or months in a year, when I hardly read at all, unable to find something compelling.
This isn’t because my choices are wrong; it’s just that, broad as they are, they build on what I already know and that ultimately makes them limited choices.
I realised this when I went book shopping with my wife on a recent holiday. I picked out books I’d heard of, books by authors I had read before. She picked out books by authors she’d never read before, just because the blurbs promised an interesting story. She enjoyed these books so much that I read them after she did.
I enjoyed both of them.
They were ‘Afterwards’ by Rosamund Lupton and ‘The Excursion Train’ by Simon Marston. Perhaps neither will make it to my list of all-time favourites, but I didn’t feel I’d wasted my time reading them. Lupton’s book contains a complicated, gripping mystery. It is also an interestingly written book with compelling metaphors and a vivid, lived-in portrayal of family relationships. The Marston book is a well-paced mystery novel set in Victorian England, with a little bit of everything: comedy, romance, tragedy and a clever plot. It’s lightweight, but that’s fine.It’s well crafted and does what it sets out do. I read it in two days and enjoyed every page.
After this, I’ve been keeping an eye out for chance finds in bookstores. Two visits to the YA/children’s fiction shelves unearthed a couple of the most engaging reads I’ve had in a while: ‘Constable & Toop’ by Gareth P. Jones and ‘A Face Like Glass’ by Frances Hardinge. The Hardinge book was absolutely brilliant, the best fantasy novel I have read in a great long while.
Thinking back to some of the more memorable reading experiences I have had in recent years, a lot of them were the result of stepping outside my usual beat and trying something else. Slice-of-life graphic novels. Philosophy. Indian fiction. Poetry. And a lot of children’s fiction.
This isn’t to say that I’ve lost my taste for weird fiction, fantasy, science fiction or the classics. But I’ve come to realise (or perhaps re-realise) that I’ve been too focussed in my reading choices.
I need to remember what it felt like to be a precocious 11-year old picking out ‘Le Fleurs Du Mal’ by Charles Baudelaire and ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino because they seemed interesting in some undefinable way — and then having his mind blown and his ideas and tastes forever changed.
I need to remember what it’s like to visit a new bookshop in a new city, perhaps while on vacation, and pick out a book not because I think it will improve me, or add to my knowledge of a favourite genre or topic, but because it seems well-written and beguiling enough to spend a few leisurely afternoons and evenings over, because it seems like a door into a new country of the mind, because it doesn’t seem like anything I’ve ever read before.
I will stop reading in straight lines, straight lines down favourite author’s bibliographies, straight lines down the genre shelves in bookstores, straight lines that miss so much of the territory in the wonderful, variegated world of books. I’m going to read in zig-zags and whirls, spirals and swirls, I’m going to tunnel my way haphazardly through the libraries and bookstores and emerge, half-mole, half-magpie and all agog with treasures and trinkets from a ceaseless trove. And that’s an adventure anyone can join in, right away.
