A New Year Pep Talk from Dad
about reading, duh
All right, all you pessimists and dumper-fire dwellers. I have some news for you. If you’re reading this, you are likely blessed and richly rewarded with a cushy life and oh-so-difficult choices like, “Which organic cheese should I buy today?” Even if your work is difficult or if you hate your job or if your bills are stacking up, you are still among the richest people in the world. So: take a breath. You are blessed and richly rewarded.
We good? OK. I had to get that out of the way. Now, please allow me to beat my drum.
A lot of my literary friends out there seem to like to talk about diversifying our reading lists and reading from small presses and reading books in translation and reading longer novels or “difficult” work. And I’m all for that, but I think it’s a little misguided. Our plight right now should not be about turning people onto Selva Almada or László Krasznahorkai but about helping people fall in love with reading, period. Even people who read don’t really read. We read un-mindfully or we read in great gulps and bursts and misread and don’t take the time to digest it. (Talking to myself here.) We half-listen to audiobooks. We read based on whatever the groupthink tells us to read. We pick the easy thing on the library display shelf. We read what our friends are reading or what some TikToker told us to read. We read based on the algorithm. We have starved our natural curiosity and farmed it out to big tech.
Let’s just all say it together as we hold hands: we are all very distracted. We are all very distracted. We are all very distracted.
We good? OK. Now that we’ve allowed ourselves to be honest with ourselves? It’s time to do something about it.
What are we going to do about it? We’re getting our heart rates up, we’re going to go outside, we’re going to find a fun way to exercise, we’re perhaps going to meditate or do some calming ritual or something that facilitates stillness. When you get home after a long day from work or schlepping the kids around or running errands, do not nosedive into your phone. Put your phone in the other room and do something that facilitates stillness. I firmly believe that stillness is a radical form of self-love, which in turn allows you to love the people you love even more. When you wake up, do not look at your phone. Pray or meditate or just breathe or exercise or go for a walk or simply just look at the trees outside your window and if you can’t see trees out of your window then look up at the sky. When you inject your life with a little bit of stillness every day I would venture to say that all of those burned-out feelings and all of those overwhelming feelings and all of those angry feelings that you have—that we all have—will probably start to diminish. Wild thought, I know. But give it a try.
One thing many people say when they learn I’m a writer is that they don’t read much, or they somehow feel bad that they haven’t read very many books lately and then they apologize. Listen: I do not care how many books you’ve read. The better questions is: why do you feel so bad? You do not need to feel bad. But if you do, you can change your life. It’s actually pretty easy. Here are four steps to changing your life.
1. Put down your phone.
2. Get your heart rate up or go outside for a little bit.
3. Take some cleansing breaths.
4. Find something to read.
I get it. Number four can be difficult, but you can do it. Do you like sports? Read about sports. And if you don’t know how to find a good book on sports, then you can always ask Google, but your best bet would be to find someone who likes to read—like myself or the person who shared this piece of writing with you—and ask them: “Hey, Person Who Likes to Read, I like baseball. What should I read?” Better yet? Go to your local independent bookseller and ask them. Or go to your local library and ask the librarian. Or just snoop around. Get a big stack at the library, nestle into a corner, read page one from each book and pick your three favorites and bring them home. If you then can only manage to get to page twenty or forty or one hundred and eighty-seven and lose interest, it’s OK. Put the book down. Try another. It doesn’t matter. There are no rules.
Try graphic novels. Try humor. Try history. Try young adult novels. Who cares. Nobody’s watching or judging. (And if they are judging you, then step number five is to find new friends.)
Slow down. Ditch your phone. Take a breath. Trust your own mind.
+++
Yesterday I sat down with a stack of books at my neighborhood coffee shop and the gal next to me said, “That’s awesome that you read. Is that book any good?”
On the top of my stack was the collected poems of James Wright. Oh, I wanted to tell her, good doesn’t even cut it. This is sublime. This is some transcendence, spiritual shit. “Yeah,” I said instead. “This is pretty good.”
“That’s cool,” she said. “One of my 2025 goals is to get a library card.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s great.”
“Yeah, totally.”
“Yeah.”
“Uh huh.”
She kept staring at me. What was I to say?
“I fully support that,” I said.
“Yeah, totally,” she said.
“Love it,” I said.
Apparently she just needed to get that interaction out of the way—and bury the lede—because then she pulled a library copy of Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo from her bag.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just got this. I thought it looked pretty good.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Love her work. Her first novel is great.”
Then we talked about Fleabag, sarcasm, and she expressed how difficult it is to hear tone in fiction.
“Interesting point, I totally get that,” I said.
I wished her happy reading, and we went back to our cute little personal spaces.
My new pal at the neighborhood coffee shop changed her life. Just like that: she wanted to get a library card in the New Year, and dammit, she did it, and she even checked out a book. (And a good one at that!)
If you are not happy with your life, then change it.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again and again: You will not look back on your life and think, “Gosh, I wish I would’ve scrolled more,” Or, “I’m super regretful that I didn’t invest in more screen time.” If you have trouble turning off your phone, put it on do not disturb, set app limits, put it in the other room or try grayscale. I use grayscale and love it. If you have an iPhone, ask Siri to turn on grayscale, or go to Accessibility—>Display & Text Size—>Color Filters—>turn on Color Filters—>tap Grayscale.
If you want other tips, I have them. Check out my piece about embracing the mind and becoming the reader you want to be here. Most of all, the only way to change your life is to start by being honest with yourself. So, are you happy? Do you like your life? Are you enjoying that book about the scuba diver who turns into a sea turtle and finds the bones of her great-great grandmother tangled up in kelp? No? That’s OK. Try something else.
In the meantime, I don’t really care what you read. Just go to your room and sit in your beanbag chair with your library stack beside you and roam around and see what you can see. Report back in a few hours and tell me what you found. And for goshsakes, eat your damn carrots.
Love,
Dad