Anyone who’s published a book or tried to has had even indispensable friends and family tell them why they’re not going to read it. Fair enough. We all have our own tastes and daily pressures. Also, the internet requires our constant attention — it’s not going to unravel human society by itself. Eventually, you only half-listen to the apologies from nonreaders, like when a flight attendant explains how a seatbelt works. About 10 years ago, though, someone surprised me.
I had sent a book I’d written to Susan Dennard, a best-selling fantasy writer whose brain, novels and newsletter I envied. We were just acquaintances, and I was fishing for favors, but she emailed back graciously: She’d find ways to support my novel but couldn’t crack it open herself because the ability to enjoy books had deserted her. “I am a broken reader,” she said.
It was the first time I saw those words next to each other. In all honesty, my immediate thought was, “Wow, that is some very kind b.s. She really does not want to read my novel.”
Then, in 2022, the reader in me snapped in half.
Over the years, I thought I’d perfectly isolated what I needed from a novel: some insight into why human beings can’t get out of their own way, a plot but not a cop show, and lyrical but not showoffy writing. Something fancy “without being schmancy,” to borrow an old Lorrie Moore line. But suddenly, I couldn’t finish even half a book. Any book. Nothing held me. Everything annoyed me. Cilantro now tasted like soap.
All this was destabilizing because my sense of self and my understanding of the world has largely come courtesy of books. When I was a kid I was an introvert, and if I showed you what my hair looked like in my teens, you’d question the existence of a benevolent god. I carried books everywhere: They were a comfort and a shield.
At the time I broke, I had a weakness for novels narrated by women — often mothers — who got trampled by life or love. (Hi, I’m Jeff. Ask me about my family of origin.) I fixated on the unexpected poetry of the sentences so much that I sometimes wished I could shrink down and walk around inside them. I don’t have the acreage here to quote the entirety of Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” or “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez, so here’s a tiny, austerely beautiful paragraph from “Loved and Missed” by Susie Boyt: “That summer it rained funerals. ‘They’re not as bad as weddings,’ Jean said. ‘At least the damage is already done.’” Welcome to my vibe.
It took weeks for me to realize that I was a broken reader. I assumed I’d just had a streak of bad luck in the Dept. of Picking. I started taking fewer chances. I bought only books that looked like books I would buy. This backfired in a kind of horror-movie sequence during which I brought a novel home; gave up on it within 20 pages; and then carried it to a bookshelf, where I discovered that — cue the jagged violins — I’d already bought a copy and not liked it.
If the joy has ever gone out of something you love — sex or group texting, maybe — you’ll suspect that what happened to me was partially a situationship with depression. OK, sure. For a while the country had been headed somewhere very specific in a handbasket. Depression wants everything it can get its hands on. What’s that thing that always calms you? Oh, it’s reading? Yoink.
I conducted some experiments. Instead of looking for a book I could sail through, I bought one that I knew would be a struggle. Maybe I was living in an upside-down world? It was an acclaimed literary novel I’ll call “Cloudy With a Chance of Plot.” I finished it just to prove to myself that I could. Actually, I didn’t read it as much as watch the words blur by like a terms and conditions agreement. Never has an author been given less of a fair chance.
For my next experiment, I retreated to the safest places I knew — novels I had loved my whole life. If you are a broken reader, do not be tempted to do this. Heathcliff is a sociopath, and Catherine could use some E.M.D.R. therapy.
As the months rolled by, I was unable to read more than 50 pages of that year’s most heralded books: “Demon Copperhead,” “Trust” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Two of those novels shared the Pulitzer Prize. Two of them will be adapted to the screen. All three were best sellers. I have separated them on my shelf so they don’t trash talk me.
Recently, I texted Susan Dennard to see if our trajectories had been anything alike. She didn’t remember using the phrase that had stuck with me, but she certainly recalled that time in her life: “It started when I hit the hardest point in my career, which was around 2015. I was really struggling on the personal front and also creatively.”
Ms. Dennard had been laboring over her intricate “Witchlands” series and found that, in her downtime, her nervous system could handle some nonfiction but no fantasy whatsoever. “A lot of it stemmed from insecurity, where I couldn’t stop comparing what I was trying to produce to whatever I was reading,” she said. “And the thought of adding more words to my brain seemed impossible. I could not focus on words from somebody else and words from myself simultaneously. I was so broken, not just as a reader, as a writer too. It didn’t even occur to me to try to read other genres of fiction. I would just try something, make it two chapters, and be like, ‘Nope, can’t do it.’”
Her dry spell as a reader lasted — even just typing this is painful — five years. Deleting the social media apps on her phone helped more than anything else. But she also began writing less work-intensive novels, her addictive “Luminaries” series about an unlikely monster-hunting society. And instead of trying and failing to read fantasy, she started bingeing a series of historical romances a friend had suggested. The sun gradually came out.
My own losing streak ended in late 2022, after about 10 months. I half-remember a New Yorker cartoon from years ago. A driver is stuck in highway traffic, and a sign on the roadside says something like, “10 Miles: Traffic Inexplicably Speeds Up.”
Writers may be more likely to break than other readers because there’s ego and other occupational hazards involved. But I’ve realized that my troubles weren’t really related to what I do for a living — or even to my 21st-century attention span. They had more to do with the sense of entitlement I’d developed as a reader. It was as if I expected all authors to ask me personally what I wanted before they started typing.
Once, begging for book recommendations on social media, I actually listed the kind of stuff I didn’t want to read: reimaginings of Jane Austen; novels with five rotating narrators who have really similar names; novels in which the main character is a city, a decade or an idea; novels about a Nebraska woman who finds a hatbox full of her parents’ old love letters; novels in which an aging man with a toothache weeps for the first time in years when he hits an elk with his S.U.V.
Without realizing it, I had put every novelist on probation from word one. I needed to stop thinking that I knew more than the author and give in to whatever ride they had spent years planning. I needed to read slowly and remind myself that if I ended up disliking a book the earth wouldn’t get sucked into the sun.
In my 20s, my favorite novel was Italo Calvino’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” which elevates the act of reading to all consuming. In the first chapter Mr. Calvino cheerily lays out detailed instructions for preparing to read. Sit as comfortably as you can, he says. Remove all distractions from the room, adjust the lighting and tell everybody to leave you alone. In short, drive out every other thought before you begin so that you can “grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation.”
Remember expectation? When it meant something different from dread?
I began rereading “If On a Winter’s Night” the other day, and it made me giddy, as it used to, but it’s not my favorite novel anymore. I can think of books by Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami and José Saramago that hit me harder because they laid bare so much about alienation, inhumanity, societal collapse — all the good stuff. I wouldn’t say I like any one book the best because there’s so much I haven’t tackled yet, though I’m reading at a steady clip again. My favorite novel: I’m still looking for it.
Jeff Giles is a novelist and the former executive Hollywood editor of Vanity Fair.
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