The Reading Life
Why bother?
Soon, you’ll be able to read my new book, Glass Century. It has been called a contender for the great Millennial novel and Nell Zink likes that it’s about “the only taboo kink left, adultery.” You should absolutely preorder it now. Once you do, come to my launch on May 6. Details to come!
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me? What kind of job can I get? How much money will I make? My youth was spent at what was probably the apex of the degradation of the humanities. The bloody cry of the striving class was Learn to Code! Get kids tablets, get kids smartboards, get kids ready for the twenty-first century about to smash them in the face. Silicon Valley and its offshoots promised easy money and only a sucker wouldn’t try to land a six-figure gig out of college at a startup pumping out an app that Google or Amazon or Facebook would happily buy up. “I would never read a book,” declared boy wonder billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, speaking for many in his cohort. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that … I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
If SBF is defenestrated now, there’s a whole class of human beings who share this sentiment. Many, these days, are men who have, in the parlance of Mitt Romney, self-deported out of the humanities. They’re streaming podcasts, streaming porn, and losing money on FanDuel and DraftKings. The higher income, higher-educated cohort who looks down on these kinds of activities still isn’t reading all that much. They’re left-liberal philistines (the new novel is prestige TV!) or rightist techies who are sure that thinking hard is a human problem that AI can solve. I will admit to a little schadenfreude around AI: it ain’t putting me out of business, but plenty “learn to code” jockeys are going to get automated away. AI can code. It can write passably too, but I can write more than passably, and if an AI program comes along to recreate the experience of this Substack newsletter, I doubt it will get many subscribers. AI relies on deception; few AI proponents want “written by Artificial Intelligence” slapped like tobacco warnings on slop books flooding Amazon. Someone asked me, not long ago, if AI was going to write the Great American Novel and if this represented some sort of existential cultural threat. After dismissing the idea, initially, of AI “pulling off” the novel I decided I couldn’t be so arrogant: AI could very well improve enough to cough up a neo-Gatsby. But then what? Our unimaginative, insular modern publishing conglomerates can barely promote human genius. Are these publicity machines suddenly going to make a literary hero out of AIBOT420 and land its book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review? Will AIBOT420 gets choice window displays at Barnes & Noble? A shot at the Booker? I’m doubtful.
AI can produce mediocre writing for us and it can summarize, with mixed results, paragraphs and books, theoretically supplanting the need to read anything. The techie may chuckle at the concept of reading itself: why bother if the machine can do it for you? I could reply like the Romantic I am, expounding on the wondrous alchemy of human consciousness represented in language, but I understand that is not going to sway any utilitarian hearts. Reading a book can, at times, be a difficult activity. It is harder than watching a show or listening to music. It requires a degree of active, sustained engagement that other art forms do not quite demand—not at that level of concentration, anyway. This does not make reading superior; I’m merely stating fact. But the act of reading, deep reading, can slowly make you a superior sort of person. (Deep reading, for the record, can be performed via audiobook. Listening to a book is its own kind of challenge.)
What type of superiority am I referring to? It’s self-evident that reading can make you smarter via knowledge acquisition, though it’s not the only way absorb information. What reading does do is give you, in the context of our phone-addicted age, a small superpower. You are able to focus much more deeply than your peers. Reading becomes the equivalent of lifting weights and getting a gym body. A machine can lift weights for you, but you won’t build any muscle until you subject your flesh to the strain of training. Athletes understand the importance of practice—that it’s literally impossible to get better at a sport without shooting thousands of baskets, hitting thousands of baseballs, or executing thousands of tackles. Today’s youth, sadly, are out of practice when it comes to reading and questing for knowledge. They, like most of us, have farmed out memory itself to the internet. I pity the twenty-somethings or teens who grew up on smartphones. I pity the middle-aged person who has gotten their attention span obliterated by Facebook on their smartphone. The best way to win that concentration back—that firm and durable intelligence—is through the practice of reading books.