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!

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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.

I prefer print books because they are physically untethered from the internet. I prefer reading on long train rides because my phone stays in my pocket and my laptop screen isn’t in front of me. Since Americans tend to think in terms of self-improvement, the Franklinian Protestantism baked into us, I read to get better. I read to be a stronger writer and I believe fully that the writer who doesn’t read much will fail to produce any work of consequence. And if you have no interest in writing but simply do not want to experience mental atrophy, you should read. To the young men do not read, my message is straightforward: reading is a hard activity, like chopping wood, and you’re soft if you really don’t ever do it. If you don’t want to read at all, you are a Warren—you are this fictional slob in this advertisement for Apple’s AI writing tools, which help you overcome the seeming impossibility of composing a straightforward email to your boss. Warren doesn’t read or write, and he celebrates when the machine makes words for him. Apple’s portrayal of their core customer is a warning for how tech companies, generally, view humanity. We are a plodding, doughy, and easily manipulated lot.

The best kind of reading, I’ve found, comes with traveling. I’m fond of long plane rides with two or three books. I’ve had to go to Washington D.C. twice this year and instead of driving, as I had done in the past, I took Amtrak. If I wasn’t gazing out the window, I was reading. Reading is time well-spent and since time is a vanishing resource, getting the most of it must be a fundamental human goal. In this age of Big Tech and artificial encroachment, I view reading a book as a small act of rebellion. I can coexist fine with technological advancement but I won’t be subsumed by it. I won’t submit, day and night, to the supercomputer in my pocket. Ultimately, today’s tech must be viewed with a degree of healthy hostility because it is savagely addictive. It is not, despite the utilitarian bent of its creators, terribly utilitarian. Electricity, the automobile, the airplane—these were meant to provide, not enslave, even when they brought negative consequences like pollution and climate change. We are in a new world, one where we must assume the worst when it comes to the purveyors of our newest tech. We must, in our own ways, rebel, and not be amused to death. Reading is worthwhile for its own sake. It offers pleasure. I am not sure what it does for character—many insidious people throughout history have read books—and I do not know if someone lacking empathy can acquire it through a novel. What reading does do is make demands of the individual. It is active, not passive, and the act of reading wills an imagination into being. The imagination is the greatest muscle of all, one that must never be allowed to atrophy away.