Filling in the hollow spaces.

I finally started reading books again, and all it took was the end of the world. They’re not even books about the end of the world, which is an old fave of mine – as long as all of the world-ending shenanigans stay on the page rather than roll into my life like a Russian tank regiment into Kyiv, sometime around the end of January next year.

One of the books I’m currently reading is—and nobody is more surprised than I—a work of literary fiction. At least, I think it is. I can’t say for sure because I haven’t read any lit-fic since The Shipping News, which I thought would be full of cool stuff about big ships in even bigger storms and maybe some pirates. This led to one of my life’s gravest disappointments.

But I think Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is not at all disappointing, qualifies as literature. The New York Times says so. And while they’ve been wrong about almost everything recently, they’ve been wrong in the particular way that only the snootiest sort of big-word idiot can be. They insist Ferrante is doing literature, so I guess I read literature now.

Why?

Why now?

You fucking know why.

Unless I wish to revisit the dark and howling wastes of clinical depression where I once lingered for the worst part of a year, I can no longer read the news. Not for a while. I’ll return to it, as I will return to writing about it here. But not for a little while.

In the meantime, what to do with a restless, agitated mind that filled all the hollow spaces with endless scrolling of events and the thoughts of others about those events?

My phone informs me that I have an extra three to four hours a day to fill in now that events themselves have forced me from their thrall.

Reading, it seems, was my sickness.

Why not make it my recovery?

This thought occurred to me as I stood in my personal library, having lost track of where I was and what the hell I had meant to do with myself. Judging by the lukewarm feel on the lips of my once-hot cup of tea, I may have been standing there for quite some time.

I have that problem, we’ve discussed it before, for which the Japanese have the perfect word - 積ん読.

Tsundoku - which combines tsunde (to stack things), oku (to leave for a while), and doku (to read), referring to the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up, often with the awareness that you may never actually get around to reading them.

But now it’s not a problem; it’s the solution, both to an immediate crisis and to an older, emerging tragedy, the accelerating erosion of any ability to focus. That’s not just my problem. It’s almost certainly yours, too. We have annihilated our attention span, individually and culturally.

The cure might be as simple as making another cup of tea and sitting down with a good book. Or even a bad one, as long as it is enjoyable.

So last week, having deleted my Twitter account, signed out of Facebook, and after removing Instagram from my phone, I turned to the bookshelves I’ve been loading up like a Tsundoku King, and I made some choices.

I doubted I’d be able to pick one title and stick with it alone. My neural architecture was no longer fit for that purpose, thanks to social media. But maybe years or even decades of drawing ever tighter, smaller loops in my mesocortical pathways had given me the left-handed gift of multi-focus. I might pick five or six or even more books from the shelf, and as long as I chose wisely (I know, I know!), they might fit rather neatly into the stunted, malformed shape I had made of my own sentience.

I would attempt a novel, a deep one too. And so I grabbed the copy of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend which had lain untouched on the bedside table for two or three years.

But I would have to work up to that with shorter, easier pieces.

Thanks to tsundoku, I had those, too, in the form of poems. A book of poetry I had owned but never read for nearly thirty years.

They are poems written by writers’ dogs, so don’t think I’ve gone soft or anything. And looking for that, I also found a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, few of which run longer than a paragraph. Perfect. Next to Meditations sat Mary Beard’s SPQR, a history of Rome, because I am a man and must do what a man does, i.e., think about ancient Rome.

A lot.

From the credenza of shame in my office…

… I fetched Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, each of which was even shorter than the Emperor’s meditations.

“Think of this as a short book,” Manguso tells us on the back cover, “composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.”

It’s all like that all the way through.

From: “One chair upon another is pornographic. Ten in a stack is aspirational.”

To: “For me, the greatest thrill of Rome was walking into the forum picking up a piece of stone where it lay and dropping it somewhere else.”

It was a tiny, pocketable little read which I placed in the bathroom to replace my disgraceful habit of scrolling the socials in there.

Unleashed: Poems by writers’ dogs, I left on the front verandah where I might be tempted to doomscroll on a coffee break. Instead, I’ve been contemplating the thoughts of good boys and girls like Robert Benson’s labrador, Jessie.

“A still warm, gay and bloody duck,

He kneels and gathers like a grail.

But bring up week-old possum warm,

His voice goes grim, his face turns pale.

It’s all retrieval, reactions vary.”

The thoughts of these dogs, on their love for us and for rolling in dead squirrels, have stayed with me where one hundred thousand tweets have not, except in the faded scar lines they left behind.

But it’s the novels that have really helped. I’m reading two at the moment. I started with three, but Tim Winton’s Juice will have to wait until I recover my appetite for the end of the world. Instead, I spend my lunchtime with Elena Ferrante in post-war Naples, and in the car I listen to Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library in place of the distressing podcasts I consumed compulsively, mindlessly, until I simply stopped.

I used to read a lot more novels. We all did. The world didn’t go to hell because we stopped. I doubt the causality. But perhaps we stopped when the world started going to hell. Correlation I can buy.

I don’t know that reading books makes anything better, not really. Nothing out there changes. But I have learned that I feel better for reading them. I am less anxious, less reactive, and more settled in myself.

So I will keep doing it, or at very least I’ll try.

Some time ago, I tried to start a reading club here and failed utterly because I simply could not bring myself to read enough. Now, I can’t help but read these books because I cannot yet bring myself to the alternative.

So, if you’ll agree, we’ll try that reading club idea again.

Once a month. As before, I’m not going to insist you read the same books as me, but I will let you know what I’m reading and what they have meant to me.

If you want to come along on this journey, you can do the same in return.

I have thoughts and feelings about both My Brilliant Friend and The Midnight Library, and in a month or so, say mid-December, I’ll write them up. You can read them with me if you like, or just read what you like instead and share that with us later.

But let’s do it together.