Choosing What To Read Next
On reasons for reading, entertainment vs edification, and the balance of a book.
In the last edition of Notes, I made a case for taking responsibility as a reader. But I love an argument, so much so that I even like to argue with myself. So, in this edition, let’s look at reading for pleasure.
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him: for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
[Samuel Johnson quoted in “The Life of Samuel Johnson”, James Boswell]
The universe — which, as pedlars of horoscopes keep insisting, is infinitely obsessed with humans and the movements of our love lives, careers, and bowels — has been trying to tell me something lately. I finally picked up its message, thankfully without the aid of hats made of tin foil, when its third attempt to communicate made a pattern I couldn’t ignore.
First, I re-read Nick Hornby’s delightful book The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. In the previous edition, I went off on how much fun I was having reading this book, which was appropriate given Hornby’s disarmingly self-certain instruction to readers that they shouldn’t bother with books they aren’t enjoying:
“If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity [...] then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV programme. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn’t mean you’re dim — you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking, or Iris Murdoch, or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. It doesn’t matter.”
Second, I read Henry Oliver, either on his Common Reader substack or on Notes, arguing that you should choose what to read from the Great Novels based on what you actually enjoy and what excites you to read, rather than simply following a syllabus. I’ll be damned if I can find now where I read that, but I’m sure I did. I might somehow be wrong, but if even the great and powerful AI hallucinates from time to time then surely my puny human brain can be forgiven for the same.
And third, I happened to read the above quote from Samuel Johnson, and I decided to re-prioritise my reading list. I pushed back a new literary novel in translation and a French classic so I could get to a novel that didn’t hold much promise of literary value but whose plot was built around a current fixation of mine. The book was The Circle by Dave Eggers, which is about a Facebook-like tech company. My inner Halt and Catch Fire fan1 is now obsessed with Silicon Valley and its infinite variety of weirdness, so I couldn’t wait to a) spend time with fictionalised versions of our tech overlords and b) enjoy their equally fictitious takedown.
I read a selection of reviews before buying The Circle, and many of them critiqued the broadness of Eggers’ attack on digital monopolies, which is less of a surgical strike and more of a ground-shaking cannonade. Thomas Andre reviewed the book in Der Spiegel, writing: “The Circle is a genre novel, with its simplistic fabrication meant to be obvious. The symbolism is abundantly clear, because it is Eggers’ only way of bringing his message to the ear.”
This meant that I had a good idea going in about the plot and the politics of the novel, and also that I shouldn’t be expecting nuance or thematic complexity. Indeed, it turned out that most of the complexity in The Circle emerged from the sheer volume of tasks that Mae, the protagonist, must perform every day in her new job working for the most powerful tech company in the world, and the exhausting number of screens (which accumulate with the pages) she must constantly bounce between.
Why then, you might wonder, did I buy and read a book I had good reason to think would be unsophisticated and unchallenging? Because I desperately wanted something unsophisticated and unchallenging. I have recently come off of some very potent antidepressants that I’d been taking for most of my adult life, an experience that even the language of hyperbole is too gentle to capture. I vomited every time I ate, and sometimes when I hadn’t eaten; I had all the symptoms of a flu on and off for two weeks; I discovered what vertigo feels like; and although I spent all day sedated to the point of zombification, I couldn’t sleep once I got into bed at night. So when I read that The New York Times had described The Circle as having “the flavor of a comic book: light, entertaining, undemanding”, I was sold.
The book is almost 600 pages, and when I first cracked its two-inch spine, I was reading only a few pages at a time. As I made my recovery, my ability to read came back to me, and soon enough I was hoovering up fifty pages in a sitting, seventy-five, finally a hundred in a go. And for the last two-hundred pages of that book, which had kept me fairly well entertained until then, I began to resent (rather than appreciate as I had at the beginning) that The Circle really wasn’t asking me to use my brain. As the spinning wheels of my mind failed to find any road to race down, I enjoyed the reading experience less and less.2
This was how I rediscovered the lie in the proposed entertainment-or-enlightenment tradeoff. It turns out to be exceedingly unlikely you’ll get one without the other. Nick Hornby is absolutely correct when he writes, “All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it.” The edifying aspects of literature are often lost on people who aren’t also enjoying the edification. But it goes the other way too: those of us for whom reading is closer to a character trait than a hobby find it difficult to truly enjoy a book that isn’t in some way challenging. If it doesn’t resist some part of your preconceptions, or your tastes, or your beliefs about reality; if it doesn’t push you to explore some outer boundary beyond the safe zone; if it doesn’t make you wonder — it’s probably not going to entertain you for long.
There’s a concept from psychology that many people know about by now, and that most of us get wrong, called the “flow state”. I certainly wouldn’t hit my buzzer on a game show to go public with my best stab at defining it academically. However, my working understanding of it is an experience of not inhabiting time or space as the thing I’m doing (usually writing) becomes the totality of my physical and mental reality. It’s this sense of losing yourself to a challenge that made David Foster Wallace tell his Harvard roommate, “If I feel my ass in the chair I’m not writing well.”
My understanding of the conditions that lead to this incredibly pleasurable erasure of the self (remember: layperson here) is that flow requires a pleasurable challenge, one that matches your abilities so that success is likely but not guaranteed. If the task is too difficult, frustration sucks the life out of your enjoyment; too easy and you become apathetic. I can’t think of a better description of my ideal book. I want to have to keep up, without feeling like I’m sprinting a marathon. I want to have fun, without leaving half of my mind on standby.
In fact, just this morning I finished my re-read of The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, and near the end Hornby nails it again with a perfect rendering of this balance. (I promise I’ll quote other writers in the next edition, but this is too good to pass on even if I have already copied out half of his book at this point.) Writing about Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping — a quintessentially “literary” novel — Hornby says:
“I have always prized the accessible over the obscure, but after reading Housekeeping I can see that in some ways the easy, accessible novel is working at a disadvantage […] it’s possible to whizz through it without allowing it even to touch the sides, and a bit of side-touching has to happen if a book is going to be properly transformative. If you are so gripped by a book that you want to read it in the mythical single sitting, what chance has it got of making it all the way through the long march to your soul? It’ll get flushed out by something else before it’s even halfway there. The trouble is that most literary novels don’t do anything but touch the sides. They stick to them like sludge, and in the end you have to get the garden hose out. (I have no idea what that might mean. But I had to escape from the metaphor somehow.)”
So, the sweet spot for a book is to offer somewhere in the vicinity of equal parts joy and challenge. It’s a delicate balance, and there’s plenty of space in my reading life for books that fall further on one side or the other. But now that I’ve worked out that this is something I value, it’s given me another standard by which to measure the novels I read, and, perhaps more usefully, something to look for when I’m choosing what to read next.
***
Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
I’ve discovered that I’m something of a junky for US politics. I think it’s because American politics matter even here in the UK yet are removed enough that I don’t take them too personally. Keeping up with goings on of the Republican and Democratic parties, the backstabbing and favour-dealing, is a kind of spectator sport; I watch what’s happening over there the way others watch sports.
Of course, I’m comfortable enough at this distance that I can watch with a mix of amusement and baffled horror, and I recognise that my US friends don’t have the luxury of being so sanguine and voyeuristic about the nonsense their elected officials get up to. But a thing can be two things at the same time, or to put it the usual way, two things can be true at once: US politics are crucial and to be taken seriously, and US politics are like The Real Housewives of D.C. for political wonks.
Anyway, all of this is to say that what’s revealed in Original Sin is vital for anyone with any stake in American politics, damning of the systems of power that privilege the elite of the elites and screw over everyone else, tide-turning (with any luck) in the corruption of Democratic hierarchies, and the most scintillating gossip I’ve read in a while. The ridiculously accruing examples of Biden’s decline and the wilful ignorance of his staff become perversely laughable, and the absurd stacking of the once-president’s mistakes and misjudgments (a Tower of Biden’s Babble) is the point.
It brings the reader to a point of exhausted incredulity that this went on for so long. But it’s also catty and thrilling and feels like we shouldn’t be privy to this inside information, like snooping on private messages between friends having an argument.
“The Quiet Collapse of Reading—and the Only Real Solution” by
This piece from
fired up my thinking, as Joel’s substack always does, and is worth reading in its own right. It also adds extra dimension to what I wrote above, about questions of joy and duty in our reading. Go and read the essay, and definitely subscribe to the substack — Joel always does a fantastic job of proselytising for the pleasures as well as the improvements of reading.I wrote all about “the best series you’ve never heard of” here.
“Opening in 1983, Halt throws us into a world in which IBM dominates the computer scene. Companies are still run by good ol’ boys like John “Bos” Bosworth (played with infinite charisma by Toby Huss), a cigarette in one hand, scotch in the other, and an off-colour joke loaded in the chamber. Bos rules the roost at Cardiff Electric, where the dreariness of office life is captured in the beige, ill-fitting office wear of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy). Gordon clocks in, clocks out, never checks in for parental duty, and long ago checked out of being a husband. It’s into this drab picture that Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace in his finest role and on best form to date) erupts like a shooting star blazing through a dark sky.”
There’s so much I could say about this hidden gem of a show:
“I could write about the wonderful production of the series; about how, in lieu of traditional table reads, the cast met at Lee Pace’s house to drink wine and read the script; how the stars of the show lived together in a rented house for the last two seasons; how Davis and Bishé have praised AMC for raising their salaries to match those of their male co-stars before they could even request it. I could write about the show’s reinvention of the will-they-won’t-they dynamic by making it about whether the central two women will become friends, stay friends, and find success in their joint venture. I could praise Halt and Catch Fire for never talking down to its viewers, for making the gist of its techno-babble intelligible while nothing is dumbed down.”
Instead of writing any of that, however, I’ll let you know that on my fourth full watch-through of this wonderful show, I came to appreciate how it’s fundamentally about failure. If you want motivation for your next big project, the tenacity of these characters will give you that; if you want solace after something you tried fails, you’ll get that here, too.
To be clear: I had a lot of fun reading The Circle, enough that I’ll soon be reading its sequel, The Every. It’s plotted and paced as well as any good thriller. However, Eggers is so keen to make his point about the corrupting influence of tech monopolies that he has to create an alternate reality that’s hard to believe in. In the world of The Circle, almost nobody can even hypothesise downsides to a company having unrestricted access to the personal lives of every single person, let alone actually be concerned about them; the main character spends a good 400 pages being told by the only voice of reason that he doesn’t want to talk to her or be online, which somehow makes her think that if she can just talk to him and get him online he’ll be happy; and all of this is set in an America where not a single libertarian protest is seen or conservative voice heard railing against invasions of privacy. It seemed to me that Eggers needed his characters to behave in certain unrealistic ways and to live in a world significantly different to the real one in order to make the very broad point he wants to make. This, of course, just means that it’s easier to dismiss that very point.
Postscript: I opened up The Every, Eggers’ sequel to The Circle, to read an authorial qualification before Chapter I that attempts to preempt, perhaps, criticisms of the kind I made above. The key line from this bit of throat-clearing is:
“All errors pertaining to technology, chronology or judgment are intentional and exist to serve you better.”
Pull the other one. The low-resolution forgery of reality constructed here is on purpose, because — what? — we readers couldn’t cope with the complexity of a more realistic world? Or because the novel’s worldview wouldn’t survive the stress-test of a scenario that might feasibly occur in the world in which we live?
Since starting to write about books on here and making videos about them for YouTube, I'm finding that that process really helps to get the books I'm reading to 'stick to the sides'. I'm reading more deliberately, often with a notebook or at least a highlighter; even books I'm reading for pure entertainment are sticking better.