When I was younger, I would try to devour a book in a day.
I wanted to live up to Henry Miller’s dictum that a person “with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
I wanted to be an enemy to greediness, meanness, smallness, pettiness, stupidness.
Literature, I was taught, makes us bigger. Wiser.
I’m older now (forties). I’m a news editor for a living, which means I swim in sentences all day long. We still call it “copy” in the news business, that term for inglorious writing people consume for information, a precursor to “content.”
I’m required to read fast and strategically, make quick decisions. Therefore I yearn to do the opposite when it’s not for work.
Writing that aspires towards art takes time to soak and savor, to understand fully. To see and hear. To feel. To reflect. And reflection is in short supply as we toggle between life and screens.
So I’ve slowed down. I may not be able to swallow books whole like I did in my twenties, but I’ve also humbled my reading expectations. As you get older, your ideas about what’s obtainable narrow — in life and reading, I’d say. Some of those tomes I bought at used bookshops twenty years ago might not ever get read. (I’m looking at you Don Quixote; all of Norman Mailer). I’ve accepted that.
I now think it’s better to only read one book a year as long as you read it well.
So I’ve started to slow down with what I read for pleasure. And to be sure, there are great pleasures to be had from reading at a gentle pace, allowing for reflection, taking notes. It unlocks secrets about morality, beauty, citizenship, community and empathy. The joys and sorrows of life. We read to be transported and entertained. Informed and illuminated. We learn who we are and who others are.
In his essay On Books, my main man Montaigne says, “In books I only look for the pleasure of honest entertainment; or if I study, the only learning I look for is that which tells me how to know myself, and teaches me how to die well and live well.”
It helps us understand how we are always changing and how our world is always changing.
So that brings me here: my mission to reflect and write about what I’m slowly reading for pleasure. I’m generally reading two or three books at the same time, in small doses, very early in the morning before the school bus comes to pick up the kids and the news of the day heats up.
I’m not a critic or a reviewer. I’m not particularly interested in my opinion about books. I’m not a scholar either. I’m a human with a reading habit. I like interesting and arresting images. Familiar voices and voices I’ve never heard before. Parallels between other books and how ideas surface over time and place. Or how the books I read (mostly classics, with a few newer titles mixed in) connect to my life and my own work as a writer (my debut short story collection Bear County, Michigan drops in 2025 from Northwestern University Press). That’s what I’ll be sharing.