Notes on my reading habits

Vanity and Shame

1. Perhaps ten years ago I decided I was going to read one big, difficult classic per year: partly to keep my mind in shape, partly for ego, partly because I just wanted to read the classics. I read War and Peace, then Infinite Jest, then Moby Dick. Then one year I read Swann's Way and knew very early on that I would inevitably read the other six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. The final volume I finished last year, and this year I might start over with Swann's Way again.

2. Being well-read is accumulative. Even if you forget most of what's in a book, you still get credit for having read it.

3. Sometimes people tell me they want to read more, and they talk about setting up a special "reading nook" at home with a comfortable chair and good lighting to encourage them to spend more time with books. I know that these people are likely never going to read very much, even if they buy the chair and the lamp and the bookcase. It's very similar to the way I talk myself into the idea that I'll spend more time writing if I have good notebooks and pens.

4. The actual way to read a lot is to make sure you always have a book on your person and, in moments when you would normally dick around on your phone, to open the book instead. Some days I'm better at this than others.

5. My favorite bookstore in the world is City Lights in San Francisco. I find something exciting and previously unknown to me every single time.

6. I like to get books in paper copies so I can underline beautiful or interesting passages with a pen. It feels good to read with a pen in hand: I’m more attentive, more alive to the sentences. If I know it’s not a book I’ll want to keep, I keep it pristine or get the ebook instead.

7. In addition to Serious Literature I read a fair amount of trash. But very rarely trash fiction—my weakness is for airport self-help books. If it purports to help me realize my dreams or soothe my neuroses, I'm all over it. You will not be surprised to hear that these books do not work. Also, they are usually very boring. I read them anyway.

8. In my adolescence I consumed teen magazines obsessively, especially Seventeen and YM. Hairstyle tutorials, fashion and makeup tips, How to Tell if he Likes You Back. I can at least take some pride in having been totally uninterested in the boy bands. The content of women's magazines has now migrated to Instagram and TikTok, almost entirely unaltered.

9. I feel some disdain when I meet someone (almost always male) who claims to read only business, leadership, and personal development books. I feel a healthy amount of shame about the "women's" books, and I think they should feel some shame too. Whenever I open books like this, the supporting anecdotes are always about pro athletes and business leaders, i.e. the dullest people alive.

10. One thing I'm proud of: many of the books that feel most important and vital to me now are books I've read in the last 5 years. Often it seems like people, without quite intending to, do most of their serious reading in their educational years and then stop. I used to hang out with a lot of English Literature academics, and many of them talked about how they'd basically stopped reading anything that wasn't strictly necessary for their work.

11. The novels that mean the most to me, as of today:

• Middlemarch, George Eliot (my post)

• Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner (my post)

• Providence, Anita Brookner (my post)

• The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (my post)

• In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

• Cousin Bette, Balzac

• The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

• The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James (my post)

I know that there’s nothing especially unique or interesting about this list. With the possible exception of Providence, These are all well-known and widely beloved books.

11. Taking a cue from Naomi Kanakia's thoughtful and honest piece, “Being a Great Books reader is always pathetic,” I do feel like there's something a bit pathetic in taking a lot of pride in one's erudition. I mean, I certainly take pride in it, but the pride is mixed with shame. It has the same root as the shame that comes with reading those airport self-help books: to take on self-cultivation as a project, as an end in itself, is a bit vulgar and vain. You can read a lot of books, learn and quote from them, and sill be selfish, grasping, lazy and narrow-minded, a burden and a bore to your friends. It doesn’t have anything to do with the way you act in the world, the things you build, the way you treat people.

12. Like many readers, I bristle when pundits suggest that the primary purpose of reading is moral instruction, the development of empathy, and/or self-cultivation. Books can't make a beautiful soul any more than meditating can make billionaires. Still, I often reflect on scenes from literature when I'm thinking about difficult situations in my life. My confidantes have commented how often I'll explain a life decision or a personal viewpoint by referencing something in Middlemarch or Proust.

13. One thing that repels me in contemporary pop culture is fandom and fannishness in all its forms. I find it very sinister, and I cringe when people online try to construct fan-like ways of interacting with books: building little clubs around them and swearing allegiance, making memes, cultivating in-jokes and talking about the characters as though they are cartoon characters living out their lives in a literary theme park somewhere. Jane Austen's works have suffered the most from this tendency. This might be the most regressive and curmudgeonly "literary" opinion that I hold: nothing good comes from fanfiction.¹

14. It would be foolish for me to boast about being well-read. Better-read people would roast my pedestrian and not very diverse list of favorites above. And when it comes to my mostly tech-based social circles, there aren't any social rewards for being well-read. It's just another nerdy hobby, or else you’re a pretentious asshole. And I struggle with coming up with good book recommendations — I can’t really tell people to read The Magic Mountain.

15. One thing I do feel confident of: I don't read classics or "difficult" books to impress anyone. That would be futile, since no one is impressed. I read them because I like them, because I find them satisfying.

16. A book that came out this year that I liked: Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar. An older classic that I hated: Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Döblin. Currently struggling with Dr. Zhivago (Boris Pasternak) and loving London Fields (Martin Amis).

17. If you want recommendations: I like Natalia Ginzburg and Clarice Lispector.

1. Don't come at me with rebuttals like "isn't Dante fanfiction" and so on. I'm not talking about fiction that borrows characters from other fiction. I'm talking about a specific way of relating to books like they’re sports teams or fashion labels or a stamp collection.