by Joe Miller
I don’t think it will surprise anyone reading this column to find out that I enjoy reading. It’s been an important part of my identity since I was a kid.
I attended first grade in El Dorado, Arkansas, where I was initially enrolled in a school that drew from a rough part of town. I was a sheltered kid who had, to that point, lived in the small town of Spencer, West Virginia. I didn’t understand any of the dynamics of the school.
What I did know was that the kid sitting next to me was having trouble reading. So, I helped him out. He invited me to hang out with his friends at recess.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned that I’d accidentally befriended the kid everyone else was afraid of. And that’s why I, an underweight, sickly kid, got through my first year of school without experiencing any sort of bullying.
We moved back to Spencer the next year. I was distraught to the point of tears when I found out that my second-grade reading textbook was the exact one I’d finished in the fall of my first-grade year. My parents promptly enrolled me in the local Christian school.
Classes there were self-paced. I would race through my work then secretly read books I’d checked out from the library. When my teacher caught me reading during class time, she doubled the amount of work I had to do each day.
Eventually we moved to Ravenswood, which at the time had some of the best public schools in West Virginia. None of my teachers there minded when I read after completing assignments.
In college, the assigned reading was more substantial, particularly in the humanities classes where I spent much of my time. But I still found time to read for pleasure.
In graduate school, we read hundreds of pages of philosophy every week. Many of my peers read nothing else. I rejected that approach. You can’t truly understand what a given philosopher is up to without understanding the social context in which that person is writing, and fiction is one of the best ways to understand the world.
That’s particularly true when you’re studying 18th and 19th century British philosophers. The novel peaked with the Victorians.
Summers during graduate school were ideal for pleasure reading. I worked as a hotel breakfast cook and a third-shift convenience store clerk to pay the bills. You can read a lot of books on those long overnight shifts.
I spent way too much of the money I earned buying used paperback novels. I was a regular at the Northside branch of Charlottesville’s Jefferson-Madison Regional Library.
My jobs after graduate school have all involved reading a ton of nonfiction. I spend much of my workday reading books, journal articles, magazines, blog posts and reports.
Lots and lots and lots of reports.
For most of those years, I kept up a pretty healthy diet of fiction reading.
My family pitched in to buy me a first-generation Kindle, back when they were absurdly expensive. I bought a lighter, faster one when I wore out the battery on my first one. E-books are easier to read while I’m eating lunch and my Kindle can store something like 20,000 books – a real benefit, given the size of apartments in DC and NYC.
I still read nonfiction on paper. (I hate electronic versions of nonfiction so much I wrote an entire book about it!)
A few years ago, I noticed a steady decline in my fiction reading.
I was spending some of that extra time watching television, but most of it was going toward mindlessly scrolling social media on my phone.
I could feel my thinking getting sluggish and my ability to concentrate dwindling, so I set myself a goal: read one novel per week.
At first, I really struggled. I’d read a few pages and then my mind would wander and I’d reach for my phone. But I kept at it. Each day I’d get through a few more pages than the last.
I ended up reading 64 novels that year. Last year, I hit 75. I finished 24 by the end of February this year, though that pace will slow considerably if it ever stops snowing.
It’s easy now to spend an entire afternoon lost in a good book. That’s a skill I’d feared was lost forever.
I’m finding that improved concentration helps with other parts of my life, too. I get less distracted in long meetings. I can write for extended periods. I’m finding it easier to read complex nonfiction for work.
Like many of you reading this, I’m old enough to remember when information was something you had to actively seek out.
These days, we carry a near-infinite amount of information in our pockets. We’re assaulted by it constantly. That’s going to get much worse now that robots can churn out text at (literally) inhuman rates.
There’s a lot to be said for setting aside all the distractions and spending a couple of hours curled up with a good, old-fashioned piece of fiction.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
