Small moments of joy

I smashed the buy button on a book the other day, the second in a series I've been reading. It's not a work of high art or literature. It was written by a friend of mine, Steve Stirling, and it's just a big, dumb, fun book about some time travellers going back and messing with Roman history. But I got a small jolt of excitement when I saw it’d been released earlier than I expected. Then I got another little hit of the happy juice when I came home from jujitsu last night, too late for Netflix but perfect timing to curl up with Steve's latest for a chapter or two.

I could explain the neurochemical processes involved, and it’s tempting to show off that psychology degree I never actually used, but let's keep it simple. It was a small moment of joy; nothing more, but also no less than that, and joy is something I’ve been finding increasingly hard to come by.

Discovering that Steve’s book was available was one such happy moment, and realising I had at least twenty cozy minutes in bed to journey through his imagined world was another. Sounds tempting, right? A cold night, a warm bed, a new book. You've had the same feeling. But also, I’d wager, the feeling that it's increasingly rare these days.

One reason I feel I owe Steve, who writes as S. M. Stirling, is that he lured me back to reading after a long break. Like most of us, I'd become chronically distracted. Some of that was work, some of it was family obligations. But if I'm being honest, a lot of my distraction was engineered by the behavioural psychologists at social media and other tech companies, who've hacked our dopamine systems, turning us into slot machine players, or maybe just slot machines.

I’d been thinking about that metaphor all morning, and was no closer to deciding which was more accurate until I asked myself, “Am I playing with Instagram, or being played by Instagram?” Putting it like that, I could finally close the app (which I’d opened twenty minutes earlier to check on my daughter’s account) and get to work.

I feel lucky that I was born so long ago that being taught to read both for pleasure and information was unremarkable. As a kid, I had a set of encyclopedias in my bedroom, and it was nothing to pull one off the shelf each night and read a couple of entries before turning out the light. Volume 5, E for Earthquake, was a perennial fave.

We were GenX kids, so we spent most of the days outdoors, unsupervised, often lurking around railway tracks and haunted houses. But when not trying to squash copper coins with passing freight trains, or daring each other to sneak into the unrenovated Queenslander vampire nest at the top of the paddock on Glebe Road, reading absorbed a lot of my ‘indoor childhood’, and looking back now, some of the more significant waypoints of my life involved books and reading.

I've written elsewhere about the first book I ever bought, Stephen King's The Stand. I was young, probably twelve or thirteen, and I'd earned some holiday money mowing old Mrs McGrath’s lawn next door. I walked into town on a hot Saturday morning with no particular purchase in mind, just knowing I wanted a book. I chose The Stand because it was enormous and thus undeniably great value, and the production department had fucking nailed it with a life-sized cardboard cutout King personally offering up his magnum opus for the discerning reader’s consideration. I considered all the raised shiny print on the cover, surrounded by dazzling silver foil lightning bolts, and I smashed the buy button, 1979-style.

I loved that book like a Labrador loves a stolen T-bone, and I read it a couple of times over that summer. It amplified my love for reading and accelerated my drive to become a writer.

Five or six years later, I was on campus, skipping a lecture to browse instead through the uni bookstore, where I impulsively picked up Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Later on my train home, I opened the book and started to read. My sense-memory of that moment remains with me. It felt like someone reaching inside my head, grabbing my brainstem, and turning everything inside out like an old sock.

That experience confirmed to me the power of reading and writing. I'd always been a reader—what else was there to do back then, 1980s television?—but I think this might have been the first time I consciously understood the magic of words. It wasn't the last time, obviously. I recall Michael Herr’s book on the Vietnam War, Dispatches, similarly affecting me. I remember staring at an early passage, open-mouthed, wondering how he'd twisted the English language into that form. I wanted to know because I wanted that power.

Initially, my method was imitation. I’d sit up late copying passages verbatim, hoping some of the magic might flow to me. I guess I was an early, organic form of ChatGPT. Maybe it helped my writing a little. But ultimately, nothing mattered as much as reading.

There seemed to be more time to read then, or at least, I had more. My full-time job in my 20s was trying to become a writer, and that involved a lot of reading. Magazines were still a thing that existed then, and as a freelancer, I worked at a bunch of them. Publishing houses sent boxes of books to us every week, hoping for reviews. I found Helen Garner picking over these boxes everywhere I went, keeping the best ones to review. But when Helen had her fill, the rest were up for grabs. I was young and broke, but I had cheap rent in Darlinghurst, and I'd grab up armfuls of these free books to spend long afternoons drinking tea, feet up, lost in reading. It was fantastically privileged. Unreal, really.

Eventually, though, I stopped reading every day. And then I just stopped reading at all. Part of that was parenthood. All parents are time-poor and exhausted, sometimes for years.

But it was also during this time, by now in my thirties, that I shifted from inhaling four or five books a week to the endless scroll instead. Not just reading, of course, but tweeting, posting, whatever.

It was a trap, especially dangerous for writers. During Twitter’s early-bombardment period, the Melbourne-based literary critic Peter Craven observed that writers were well-adapted to the platform because they were used to crafting words within limits and building an audience. What Peter didn’t see, what none of us saw then, was the danger of immediate feedback loops.

That instant gratification of a like, a comment, or God-help-you, a celebrity retweet contrasted starkly with the steam-powered world of book publishing. You might spend ten years creating your work there, only for it to be rejected, or even worse, ignored. I made a living from writing partly because I understood how attritional it could be. Some talented, sensitive writers, precisely because of their sensitivity, did not survive the attrition. Many more of them got lost in the dopamine-fueled funhouse of the socials.

And all of us, you too, struggled because the world changed faster than our ability to evolve.

Just as billions of people have suffered terribly from the universal availability of ultra-processed, hyperpalatable and nutritionally worthless junk food, so we’ve all suffered within exquisitely engineered, neurochemically exploitative, toxic information systems.

But joy is still there, waiting for us, like a life-sized cardboard Stephen King smiling gently, hands outstretched, offering us a copy of his latest work. Of course, you don’t have to read the King, S.M. Stirling, or even me. If your tastes run to actual literature, one of the nicest developments I’ve noted on Substack is the rise of reading clubs. There’s at least four different groups doing year-long reads of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Classical Book Club does monthly reads of all the old bangers. There are sci-fi clubs, Sherlock Holmes clubs, the Deep Reads epic poetry nerds getting their Iliad on from January through June, before kicking into The Odyssey in the back half of the year.

It sounds a bit like work, but it’s not. Nobody is going to make you stand up in front of the group and deliver your paper on Tolstoy’s use of the personal to reflect the universal. It’s an opportunity, I think, to use the technology which has fucked us so badly, to help us rediscover something we lost, a simple source of human joy, the love of story.

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And after those lovely thoughts, some vile commerce. The last book in the first season of my romantic thrillers is out this week, as is the collected edition everywhere but Amazon, at a big honking discount for my faves. That’s you. You’re my faves.

It’s not for everyone, and please feel free not to tell me if it’s not for you.

But if it is, I got some universal links for you, right here.

The Bjorn Identity

Licensed to Love

And for the next day or so, the first two books are free on Kindle.

For Her Eyes Only

The Girl Who Came In From the Cold