My Fruitless Fight to Finish a Book. Any Book.
How my reading habits deteriorated into a compulsion, and why I'm ready to correct it
Lately, I can’t finish books. That doesn’t stop me from relentlessly seeking them out.
Something about reading took root in childhood, and I’ve since been so infatuated with books, pages and words that I believe them the answer to all states of mind.
Overwhelmed by parenthood? Buy a book. Drained from work? Buy a book. Celebrating a victory? Happy day, I shall buy a book!
They collect in heavy purses and get lost under the seats of my car. I set them in meaningful places — on my nightstand, next to my favorite coffee-drinking chair, and in a basket on the kitchen island. I read 50 to 100 pages. Sometimes more.
Then I forget them.
I wasn’t always this way. I don’t think any of us were. I studied journalism in college and went on to enjoy an early career in the now-gasping-for-breath field of traditional newspaper media. I entered late in the game, when the carpets in newsrooms had gone musty and the talent bitter. Once titans in their cities, the newspaper businesses were now burdened by egos their budgets couldn’t afford. I worked in tall buildings where my employer’s name loomed high over busy streets, but our floors were shrinking — and our newspaper thinning.
When writing was my life
Back then, I was forced to read and I was still good at it. As a reporter, I combed through research for hours a day to support my articles. I saturated every minute of commute time with non-fiction audiobooks. The more I took in, the more I was inspired to write.
And write I did. Thousands of words each week, and sometimes thousands each day. Articles gushed out of me, and fresh ideas fluttered into my consciousness as easily as air eased into my lungs.
Things came to an eerie halt during the first pandemic shutdown when my colleagues and I were sent home to our apartments to work in silos for an excruciatingly long year. Things started to snag then, I think. When life online accelerated into an all-consuming pseudo-reality. When in-person life deteriorated, and tech companies swelled to meet the new digital-heavy needs of the world.
Katherine May, the author of “Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age,” put it poetically in her book.
“Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book. It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdowns ended, but it did not. It’s as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices. I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discreetly away.”
How consuming became my life
Plenty of proverbial ink has been spilled about the digitally depraved ensnaring of our attention. Anyone who’s picked up their phone to check the time and then emerged three hours later, sore and dazed, from a binge on TikTok knows that they’re being played.
It’s become a sort of humorless joke in our household. One of us will disappear for hours and then stumble into the bedroom, unable to make eye contact with the awaiting spouse.
“Sorry,” we say. “I was in the machine zone.”
It’s now that addiction that’s so normal it goes without saying.
The content world has changed so rapidly over the past 10 years that everyone I know is still reeling from it. Not just the it’s-actually-not-funny addictive nature of the video content, but the sheer abundance of all content.
Can I interest you in everything, all of the time?
Bo Burnham’s creepy pandemic special lives rent-free in my head, as the kids say, in the three years since its release. Sometimes I find myself singing the opening lines of “Welcome to the Internet” when presented with a cornucopia of content.
Welcome to the internet
Have a look around
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found
We've got mountains of content
Some better, some worse
If none of it's of interest to you, you'd be the first
While I find the aggressive auto-playing videos on all social platforms to be the most egregious in our current content milieu, there are less overtly wicked sources of media gluttony to which I’m currently falling prey.
As a lover of books, I never thought I’d find myself overwhelmed by too many. But when it comes to even regular old books, I am in a new frontier. Audible and Kindle were manageable. I had to pace myself to one book a month or pay the difference. Today, Library apps like Libby and Hoopla have opened the floodgates, making it possible for anyone with a library card to have access to over a billion book titles. Add in my physical local library branches and inter-library loan programs, used bookstores bursting with supply and not enough customers, and we book-shoppers are in a state of sheer overabundance. The kind that makes us sick.
Aspirational book hauls
I visit the library once a week, a schedule I’ve committed to under the guise of child enrichment. My son is nearly 4-years-old and reading to him is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I take it upon myself to sift through mountains of children’s picture books to find just the right ones — the ones with real, artistic illustrations, with plot and intrigue, and with a storytelling flair that inspires both delight and introspection.
I pile a stack of 20 or so books into our cart, and I later struggle to open the car door for fear that a book or six will slide into the parking lot.
Alongside his “enrichment,” I must also enrich myself. So naturally, I check out stacks of books per week that I cannot possibly finish. So I set them on my bookshelf alongside many other books that I have skimmed but not read completely.
“The books become menacing, teetering on every table in the house, massing like the disenfranchised before a riot,” wrote May, author of “Enchantment.”
“Stacked by my desk, they gather alarming cauls of dust. I resolve to build more bookshelves, but that project, too, eludes me.”
Humans are meant to create, not just consume
I did the thing that everyone does when they feel their attention dangerously threatened. I declared a digital detox to my husband. Apps were blocked. Phones were moved into remote locations.
The silence enveloped me. That’s when I realized I missed thinking for myself. While books, podcasts and videos are enriching, fascinating and inspiring, it’s downright gluttonous to be in a constant state of consuming someone else’s thoughts — never taking the space to digest them, connect them and put them into my own words. I’m sick from the glut.
Friends have encouraged me to write a column in a traditional news outlet, but I have no interest in meeting the needs of someone else’s audience. I know that life and I’m tired of it. I want to write to readers but not for readers.
That’s why I’m here. I’m not going to stop coming home with armfuls of books. I probably won’t stop listening to podcasts and audiobooks in the bathtub. However, it’s time I do something with the network of ideas zinging through my brain, seeking connection with a grounding force.
I want to think deeply again.
I want to finish a book.