I’m going to wager a bet that for most people, that’s exactly what fiction reading is: R&R. for me, it’s been a rather arduous trek to arrive at that same destination.
you know how musicians can’t help but listen to music with a technical ear? writers—especially one as interested in form as I am—find it hard to read without a constant eye on the how, which, if your aim is to get your mind to shush, can be quite tiring.
but that’s the foot soldier reason, meant to take the first hit so my real motivation can remain in the background all assassin-like. as a recovering perfectionist slash workaholic—a theme present in seemingly all my posts, so at least you know I’m hyper-aware of it 😆—I have, historically, found hard things easy and easy things hard.
don’t take this as a skills statement (though that’s highly true for the neurosomatically diverse among us). I mean it quite literally: when a thing feels hard, it makes me feel more comfortable doing it than if it feels easy. easy scares me, or it did until recently. I believe another word for it would be “sucker for punishment.” or, “it don’t feel right unless it hurts” 😏
so when it comes to reading, I’ve been no different. as an interstitial reader, I’m always reading several books at once (unless I sit down to start ‘n finish a particular work in one sitting, which usually only happens when I’m sick-but-well-enough-to-read, or so down in the depths of despair that I lock myself in my bedroom for the day—otherwise, life calls too frequently (and loudly) for a single book to get an exclusive slice of my attention). this is not the hard part.
what is, is that I’m also making lots of notes (the highlighter function is the best/worst thing that ever could’ve happened to ebooks, which is the format in which I read most of the time despite surrounding myself with an ever-growing sea of books in print). now, notes don’t tend to be a problem when you’re reading fiction because, unlike with non-fiction, the author’s intention isn’t to throw insight darts at you on every page. they’ve built a world, invited you into it, and there you are, enjoying the sweet, juicy fruits of their back-breaking word labour.
alas, true to form, I prefer fiction with a bite; the bite being the requirement for me, the reader, to go the extra mile—ergodic literature and such—where what I get out depends on the amount of work I put in (Espen J. Aarseth in his 1997 book Cybertext, borrowed from physics the the word “ergodic”; the term itself is derived from the Greek ergon / work, and hodos / path).
hand me an airport read and, well naturally I’d still read it (and very likely enjoy it, too; reading is life!), but it wouldn’t make me feel accomplished. this, mind you, is not a measuring stick I use specifically for reading, but more broadly for everything else (sans breathing, which apparently I don’t know how to do well - go figure).
lately, after forming a joint task force to a) go as phone-free as possible and b) reset my stubbornly upside-down circadian rhythm, I’ve taken to reading fiction before bed. initially, I dug enthusiastically into my TBR non-fiction pile, but soon discovered that as soon as I opened the Kindle, I would keep reading for the next several hours, bargaining with myself at the end of each chapter that the next one would be my last for the night, promise! frankly, not much has changed since I switched to fiction, but since the books I’m choosing for bedtime isn’t as mentally stimulating as works about the real world (meant, as they are, to keep me in it), I feel sleepy sooner and thus have more success falling asleep at some point.
and this is where, at last, I learned to embrace rest-reading. books with nothing to highlight or click (the exception being Philip K. Dick, where I’m constantly looking up terminology for his self-coined contraptions—homoplasmate, anyone?). what I’m referring to, then, is rest for my fingers more so than for my mind 😅
#100DaysToOffload/7