How I Learned to Read Way, Way More

I had to rethink my relationship to attention

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I used to read a few books a year. Now I read about one a week. If you’d have seen my habits only a year ago, you’d understand how unlikely this is. It’s a little embarrassing. I look back and feel as though I spent several years of my life without showering. How was I getting by at all? Why didn’t anyone say something?

I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.

Having experienced these and other benefits, I consider myself an evangelist. I want you to join me. I can’t guarantee my method, if it can even be called a method, will work for you, only that it worked for my addled mind, and mine was such a severe case that I can’t help but believe my map, however crude, might hold something for you.

It comes down to a shift in how I think about attention. The atrophied muscle. The diminished faculty. Growing weaker by the day, besieged on all sides by distraction. The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse. But while attention is near the heart of the situation, a subtle distinction makes a world of difference.

There are many kinds of attention. Here are two: the muscular attention you remember from high school, and pure attention, where the self dissolves and time passes differently. When it comes to reading, we’d appreciate it if the former would kindly beget the latter. Think back to when reading was easiest, most enjoyable. You’re thinking of pure attention, of being in the deep thrall of words. Here, information is at its most accessible. The coconut splits open and discloses the sweetness.

But the hard, hairy shell is too daunting for many people. You’ve probably heard this, or said it yourself: “I’d love to read more, but I can’t.” I can’t focus. I can’t sit still. My mind wanders. “I can’t crack it.” People who want to read more are aware of the tender goodness inside literature, but the barrier is too stubborn. They’ve become too weak to pierce the skin. Or so they think.

If you’re hoping for an easy trick to bypass this obstacle entirely, I’m sorry to disappoint. There is, or at least there was for me, a mandatory effort on this front. But as with breaking into anything, it’s useful to find the weak points. It was while probing that I found my way in. The sweet spot wasn’t attention, really, but something closely related to it.

It’s difficult to pursue anything you don’t have a genuine appetite for. Absent appetite, some other incentive (a salary, necessity) has to compensate. The benefits of literature are abstract enough that reading is almost exclusively a leisure activity. “Make reading fun” sounds too simple, because it is an oversimplification. Some of the most worthwhile books are not, strictly speaking, fun, and those are exactly the books we have in mind when we imagine a more serious reading life. But fun is a wonderful starting point because fun and play lend themselves to curiosity. Curiosity is an attention multiplier.

Curiosity is a child. It’s greedy and unpredictable and has two modes. It’s either in frantic activity, or it’s dead asleep. When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away. A child curious about the taste of dirt will find their way to dirt. The whole of the child’s spirit will narrow toward dirt. The child will slip through any gap in the pen. The strictest parents know there’s always a gap. “No” means nothing.

When I consider the attention crisis as a curiosity crisis, some things become clearer. For argument’s sake, embrace some hypothetical good news: our faculty of attention isn’t shrinking after all. We’re as capable of sustained attention as any of our forerunners, including the French ones in voluminous powdered wigs who attended the grand salons and kept vast personal libraries. The problem, in that case, would be misapplication.

Pure attention isn’t rare. I see faces in pure attention all the time. Glassy eyes. Knitted brows. Slackened jaws. Immersed. Enthralled. This state is pleasurable because it removes us from the world. There’s no suffering in pure attention. Some call it prayer. I’m inclined to as well. Not because I’m religious, but because prayer goes somewhere. It’s addressed to something. It faces a direction. Prayer faces upward. In pure attention, we are malleable. We absorb and we melt into and we pass through, like mercury. It matters a great deal what we take in while in this vulnerable state. It matters what direction we’re facing.

It’s no coincidence the internet is holding our attention with ever more colorful, infantilizing distractions. Take those AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic fruit. Sugary. Bright. The strawberry cheats on the banana with the pineapple. And then what? The strawberry gets pregnant and gives birth to a pineapple. The banana is present. And then what? The only thing that distinguishes this from entertainment for babies is its lewdness and lack of a perfunctory moral lesson. If prayer makes the Catholic more like a saint, then pure attention, spent like this, makes us more like crass, immoral babies. Attention here is only the price. The thing that’s spent. The child is the one that stole the credit card.

Curiosity stays childlike, always; childlike, even as everything else matures and grays and turns cynical. Curiosity is easy to distract and, because it’s indiscriminate, easy to exploit. It pursues zealously, tuckers out quickly. Its desires are pure; good and evil don’t figure in. It’s up to the parent to guide the child here. My return to reading was a collaboration between play and discipline, child and parent. Curiosity supplies the energy. Curiosity is attention’s white-hot spearpoint. I am its guide. I take aim.

I was already working on this essay when I came across these words from Simone Weil, from one of her letters:

“In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.”

A funny thing about reading is that often, when you read daily, the thing you need to read most will emerge. A strange providence.

What struck me was the submission of Weil’s intellect to appetite. Anyone familiar with Weil knows it’s a significant event for her to cooperate with hunger. Obedience is the right word. It’s not true, or at least it shouldn’t be, that the parent dominates the child. The parent protects and guides the child. The child, the sheer force of the child’s youthful energy, steers the parent.

You’ve experienced curiosity at full bore. You’ve lost hours to true crime on YouTube, surfaced from a show at three in the morning, tracked a fight between strangers on the internet down to the last granular detail. There’s something juvenile about this, isn’t there? Helplessness in the face of an urge. It’s like eating ice cream with your hands. Eat. Eat. Eat. This is pure attention, and we spend a great deal of time in it. It’s dissociative and pleasurable. It can be abused.

The parent’s power is discipline and discernment. Nothing, I’m sorry to say, will make vegetables taste like ice cream. But you can live in such a way that the tongue’s relationship to sugar changes. People trying to get back into reading sometimes reach for the densest, most impressive novel, then bow out believing they’re too stupid to access it. Intelligence isn’t the culprit, but palate.

Where to start? By living the life you live, you already have books and authors in your periphery, names that recur. Answer them. There’s almost always a why there. For me it was David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction essays. Literature on today’s internet favors the nonfiction essay, and that’s what I knew; reading him was the Rolls Royce of what I was already consuming. He made me feel smart. As Patricia Lockwood wrote in her very funny takedown:

“He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them.”

I was curious that something I felt so personally was, in fact, a nameable and even banal effect of reading him. It spoke to an almost supernatural element of literature. Ignorance is only what we don’t know. I love mysteries. What was it about this man’s writing that worked on me? What was the quality in it that made it feel so impressive? I went digging.

I learned about his influences. DFW led me to Donald Barthelme. Barthelme led me to Pynchon. Pynchon led me to wanting to read more in general. While talking to a friend about this, he recommended Clarice Lispector. Lispector led me to the mystics. Weil, Rumi, Eckhart. The mystics led me to philosophy. Then came Dostoevsky, who bridged philosophy and the novel. I began to read all sorts of novels. Old and new. Classics and deep cuts. I became grabby. It was like how I used to be in elementary school, when I would pick up a book, any book, because it was a book, and read it front to back. Childhood.

I’m led by my curiosity. I buy new books constantly. I shelve them in different slots to keep every shelf alive. I read without expecting this to be the book that changes my life or becomes my favorite. I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold. I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.

If a book or an author kindled my curiosity even slightly, I acquiesced. I would buy a copy on Thriftbooks, open it right when it arrived, and not so much read the book as play with it. I was a hummingbird zipping flower to flower. I had to cooperate with the zigzag, the frantic little heartbeat. It felt manic and diffuse. Now, like a hiker pausing to look down behind him, it looks like a very obvious path. I want to stress how crucial it was for me to work with appetite. A little human curiosity can move mountains.

Eventually literature itself began to open up, to impose itself. This was an overwhelming spiritual experience. Individual authors dissipated, replaced by a vast, living heritage. It seemed to me that, across traditions and cultures and time, writers had all been borrowing from this singular source, and everything that had ever intimidated me about reading, the particular genius of singular talents, the thickness of leatherbound tomes, the rigorous demands of dense prose, all evaporated and went away.

Some writers would judge me for arriving so late to figures I’ve met only recently. That’s okay. I’m only grateful, eternally grateful, to have arrived at all. Who cares about judgment while holding such a gift? I get emotional about it. I’m spoiled to love reading and to have so much to read. The world is sweeter than it was.

Today, words are sprouting through cracks in my daily life in unexpected places. I journal constantly. I write letters to friends. The fact that there’s a pen in my pocket right now makes me happy. My writing, back when I read little, was bumbling in the dark hoping I’d touch something valuable by accident; a writer who doesn’t read now strikes me as absurd. How does a bee make honey without visiting the flowers?

My internet usage is lower, but I’m by no means an ascetic. It’s not that I don’t see what’s online. It’s that it feels farther away now, even as I’m looking right at it. It’s taken on a different quality. A truer one, I think. I’ve developed what I think of as ephemeraphobia: a natural aversion to cheap, fleeting thoughts. They make me slightly nauseous.

I was never sure what was important, and what wasn’t. I experienced reality as a series of disconnected images. Each one was loud, urgent, and temporary. The feed refreshed, and there was an entirely new constellation. My thoughts resembled the medium I engaged with. To be too attached to the right now is to miss the bigger picture. The powerlessness that chronic social media use inspires comes from the medium’s pact with the absolute present. New. New. New. Show it to me. I recall scrolling to the very top of the feed and desperately trying to pull the absolute present toward me with my thumb, needing to know: And then what?

But the present is a riptide. You’re only human; the spirit of the age will ragdoll you. You will suffer. Become tired. The absolute present exhausts your curiosity first, then the rest of you. No wonder you can’t open a book. Your curiosity is out like a light before noon.

I framed it as good news that our problem might not be attention, but exploited curiosity. Part of me agrees. Another part finds it the more macabre picture. Attention is only a resource. A precious one, but a resource. Curiosity is your very spirit. Its corruption for profit might be the worse sin. Reading, the nurturing of curiosity, is the opposite of that abuse.

I’ll be transparent. Even here, with books scattered across the table, pure attention only comes sometimes. I still need muscular attention. Reading takes effort; there’s no way around it. But pure attention does visit me. More and more, these days. I keep a clean house for it. I attract it with special occasions. Every morning, before anything else, I read. Every night, I close everything down, turn on a lamp, and I read. I have rituals. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t.

But a minute in pure attention, while facing the right way, is worth more than years facing the wrong one.