I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind when my goal is to stay on top of things. So I feel that today, it’d be good to get back to basics. Let’s talk about a return to reading.

Yeah, remember reading? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started.

My suspicion is that even those of us who are reading aren’t reading the way we want to, with as much gusto and immersion as we know we’re capable of (or wonder whether we’re still capable of).

Recently, I celebrated my 39th birthday, and there’s something about facing down the final year of my 30s that’s making reflective about what I’m putting in my brain. When I turn forty, what will I have learned? Whose voices will I have listened to? How have I participated in the world in the context of my vocation and hobbies, most of which have books at their core?

And I’m not just talking about eating my psychological vegetables; I don’t regret the horror and romance that I’ve made part of my reading life in the slightest. But I want to incorporate more media—books and other written words in particular—that’s substantial, memorable, and enhance my life in a way that just accepting whatever the algorithm serves me can’t.

And sure, these reflections come from the fact that I’m aging, but also because of how underwhelmed I feel about my reading habits for the past few years. There are some real winners on my “read” list, but I’ve occasionally noticed myself shying away from things I know would be thought-provoking and maybe even life changing.

And I’ve been asking myself—why is that?

There’s a tendency to become protective of our minds in a way that’s fear-based rather than simply selective. Just look at the types of books that get banned: there’s a literal panic around subject matter that people find threatening. But as much as I try to be open-minded, something in my head is more resistant than ever to things that are too novel (if you’ll pardon the pun).

2020 set a precedent where we read so much less than usual—even though supposedly we had more time to. I mostly I just scrolled while waiting to see whatever the next disaster was. And even though I’ve picked up the pace since then, I think that year put me in a habit of resistance to reading more challenging subject matter.

It’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve uncovered a need for psychological safety in myself that I didn’t have before. It’s easy to watch low impact shows and movies and stick to predictable, tropetastic stories. Don’t get me wrong, I love romance, but it’s also a genre for people who want to know exactly what to expect, and I can admit to myself that’s a big part of why I read it.

Predictability, staying cocooned in my comfort zone takes a lot of magic out of literature and life.

Call it complacency or emotional overload, or even collective trauma, but I think things like last year’s drop in nonfiction sales shows that I’m in line with overall trends. The challenge of sitting down and learning something new is a lot for people to take. Educating ourselves with books is essential for people to seek justice and learn from history, and to sharpen critical thinking, but in moments like these, it can seem like either not enough or too much.

And for me, the last couple of years have been pretty cognitively challenging in another way.

Specifically, and I mentioned this in my first newsletter back a couple of months ago, I had a debilitating chronic migraine situation. And around the same time, I had to adjust to a few other health-related issues that took up a lot of my emotional and mental bandwidth. And yeah, I read, but the brain fog that comes with the type of issues I was having can make you feel like everything is just flowing through your brain and out again like water through gravel.

But now my health challenges seem to be in more of a maintenance mode, and I’m waking up on the edge of middle age with this urgency to make all the time I spend with a clear head count for something. It feels kind of like crawling out of a swamp, covered in mud and half-hyperventilating, and having someone walk up and say, “Oh good, you’re back. Here’s your to-do list.”

So between now and my 40th birthday next year, my goal is to take a more thoughtful, more carefully engaged approach to the books, stories, and articles I read. I want to read poetry and pick up classic novels I’ve been putting off.

And if you’ve stuck around to listen to me ramble this long, it might be because you’re interested in doing something similar.

If you’ve been a reader for a long time and have experienced the kind of fatigue I’ve been describing—and I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who either write books or interact with them in some way—you might relate to the idea of wanting to renew, refresh, and show courage in your relationship with reading.

I want to challenge myself again, and I’m hoping you’ll join me, both to keep our brains from melting and to hopefully uncover inspiration and knowledge we can use to make a positive impact on the world. Because even if it feels like it’s ending, we’re not dead yet.

Skimming Kills Your Soul

The volume of information we face daily is insurmountable. It’s like trying to squeeze thousands of people through a single doorway or trying to drink the ocean with a straw.

One study from UC San Diego determined that the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes of information across our various devices every day, the equivalent of about 100,000 or a solid, medium-large fiction book. And the wildest part is that study came out in the 2010s.

So we can’t give our full attention to every single thing that comes across our path—our tiny brains cannot process it. As an adaptation to most of our reading now being done online, we’ve all learned to skim. Our vision zigzags from the top of the page to the bottom (the headline, intro, and conclusion) then does a side-to-side sweep for points of context. Then we might go back through the text to search for details to the degree that we think we might need them.

It’s not the most effective way to take in a long form story or article, but definitely a more realistic way to approach a world with too many units of information constantly vying for our attention.

But sometimes it’s even less comprehensive than that. And this is where I’m going to get judgy.

I’ve seen trends where people skim-read books, in that they skip paragraphs or pages entirely if they’re deemed too long or text-heavy; they’ll look for lines of dialogue or keywords. Some people aren’t even bothering to read more than AI summaries (they really really want you to read their summaries by the way—I mean, that PDF looks long, do you want me to summarize it?) And no, this isn’t TikTok panic, I’ve heard it in person.

And I’m not on TikTok. Fuck TikTok.

Anyway, this haunts me. I lose sleep over it.

If that sounds mean, so be it. But I’ve encountered people both on and offline who identify as book lovers, but are almost solely skim readers. Most seem a little sheepish or frustrated about it, which is relatable. It’s hard to overhaul the way you read from one format to another, and our brains are now all accustomed to a world that is constantly spewing garbage at us.

But others proudly admit to it and get annoyed when books don’t accommodate their shallow reading style.

“There are too many words. Why do these authors expect me to read all that? I only read dialogue.”

And that’s when I turn into the joker. Rage bait taken. I’m flopping around on the bottom of the boat, waiting for the club to put me out of my misery. But who cares if I’m mad about it, right? Who am I to tell people how to spend their free time?

Here’s my appeal—for your own benefit as a reader.

If you’re a writer, hopefully you’re able to recognize what people are giving you when they read your book. You’re making a bid for them to spend hours of the only life they have on what you’ve created. It’s not a small thing for either of you: writer or reader. And when they make that choice, you want it to be worth it for them, right?

Now, I’ll turn that around and say that, as a reader, you probably want the books you pick up to matter, right? So why stay on the surface? Don’t you want more?

The Value of Deep Reading

Here’s what I’m not going to do today: I’m not going to define what a “good book” is. Everyone has a different concept of what is challenging and what is enjoyable, and whether a book is “good” or “bad” is immaterial to this conversation.

This is more about the way in which we read. It’s a case for reading deeply and with full concentration. It’s a plea for us to do our best to rebuild or strengthen our ability to concentrate on a book, even though the way most of us have been rewired can make it kind of a slog.

If we’re just talking about retraining that connection between your eyeballs and your comprehension, you can read any kind of book deeply. Hell, you can read fanfiction deeply. You can also read philosophy or the classics shallowly. And if you’re still at the beginning stages of getting your reading mojo back, maybe something snootier people might consider “lowbrow” is the on-ramp you need to get back into it. Only you can be the judge of whether that’s leading you in the direction you want to go.

Quality reading requires you to concentrate on something for more than a few seconds, or even minutes, at a time without getting distracted. It requires you to read a full page instead of skimming the first and last lines of each paragraph. It opens you up to new sentence structures and words and concepts you may never have heard before, and when you take note of these things, that’s when the enrichment begins.

(And don’t get me started on how fantastic that is for you if you’re a writer.)

That high-quality attention has been one of the major barriers holding us back from engaging with books in the way we used to. The way we still want to. What fun is a long fantasy novel if you have to remind yourself what’s happening every five minutes because you keep looking at your phone.

(And don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely preaching to myself here.)

There’s another complicating factor for people whose jobs are tied up in books. As publishing people—editors, writers, book reviewers, and even booksellers—we can get fatigued incredibly easy with the expectations placed on us. And we can find ourselves more focused on volume over weight. That’s not a moral failing; we’re responding to our environment and the pressures placed on us to stay in the loop.

And especially if we’re editing, we are doing something resembling a deep read. A different, harder, more draining version of it, in fact.

Maybe you’ve been asked to write blurbs. Or you have to beta an upcoming book for a friend. You just need enough information from that nonfiction book to write a press release or pitch letter, or you just have to get the gist of a huge stack of romance books so you can make an Instagram image carousel. And maybe you’re a writer who is just struggling so hard to get enough words on a page that putting more words into your brain seems insurmountable.

And maybe you’re just exhausted, fried by too much information.

But reading—deep, focused reading—contextualizes things that are happening to you and around you, so you can see patterns of history and social and environmental phenomena. It arms you with information that will help you move forward, even when that might seem impossible. It helps you empathize with others and understand points of view you haven’t considered before. And any genre, fiction or nonfiction, can help fill those gaps.

Reading can be more than just an escape hatch from a terrifying world or something you do to keep your place in a community. It’s not just lip service to say that it’s one of the most profound things you can do with your time.

Reading and Your Brain

Recently, I read a book called Reader Come Home by neuroscientist and literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf. She also wrote a book you may have heard of called Proust and the Squid. That’s the one that made her well known as a researcher of reading and the brain.

Wolf quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman, who said that “There are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are in the Milky Way galaxy.” And she goes on to describe how each of those constellations that form in our brains are different for every person on earth.

When you give all your focus to reading, you blast that old aphorism about only using ten percent of your brain to bits. Reading combines the parts of your brain that control language, vision, motor skills, cognition. It calls on us to access background knowledge we have about different subjects—knowing the definitions of words, geography, history, lore, or whatever.

And here’s what makes reading so important if you want to be a positive force in the world: you gain the type of understanding that makes what you find in books comprehensible…from other books. For every book you read, you increase your chances of getting even more out of the next one.

The less background knowledge you have, the harder it is to engage with a book. And unfortunately, the harder it is to engage with a book, the less you’ll feel like reading, and the less background knowledge you’ll accumulate.

Part of what made it hard to read as a kid, at least for me, was the fact that I had so little knowledge of the world. But it’s also one of the few ways to gain—and especially remember—that background knowledge.

And that so-called empathy we supposedly gain when we read fiction? That value comes from giving the characters our full attention and truly inhabiting their worlds. We don’t get it from just floating on the surface of a story.

This is part of why I’m saying start easy and with things you enjoy. But pay attention, because the more clues you gather, the better your experience gets.

The Pleasure of Reading Diversely

If you do want to read more books that challenge you, you need to be able to associate books with feeling good. That could mean hedonic pleasure, meaning it’s enjoyable while you’re doing it, or eudemonic, the pleasure you feel after having accomplished something. Pretending you can develop a reading habit without some type of emotional reward is self-deluding.

Remember that reading can be about what you want to learn, not just keeping up with everyone else is into. One estimate puts the number of books in the world at 158,464,880. You can find a book on basically anything you’re curious about.

To get super Reading Rainbow about it, there is an entire world of books out there. Even if you, like me, can’t get out and see the regular world as much as other people might be able to, whether that’s because of money or disability or whatever else—you have windows to the rest of existence. And reading diversely is what will help reading carry you to new places you might not visit otherwise.

When we talk about diverse books, your mind might go to movements like “Own Voices” or “We Need Diverse Books”—this ongoing effort to publish more books from people of all races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and sexualities. But I’ve noticed that if someone says I should read books featuring “Diversity of Thought”, I hear it as a euphemism for “read an inflammatory money-grab by a Fox News pundit.”

But honestly? Reading diversely is a win for everyone, and it’s easier than you think. Unless you’re reading only things in one genre, from one pool of authors who all follow each other on Instagram, your instincts are probably already leading you in that direction.

So just start reading about stuff that you’re curious about—any expert who writes a nonfiction book will have different thoughts than you have. Read something in translation from a different country. They will explore things that aren’t even on your radar. And yeah, definitely read books from people of different races, genders, and sexualities—even if you have similar values, your opinions are never going to perfectly align.

Fear of being challenged by something new keeps so many of us stuck in reading ruts. If you want to move forward, you’re going to have to rip that bandaid off.

And read books from twenty, thirty, fifty, one-hundred or more years ago! There is absolutely no way someone writing back then is going to use the same terminology or look at things from the same perspective as you do.

And if they do? I don’t know. I guess get back in that time machine before you kill us all.

Find an Approach that Works for You

As for format, different things do happen in your brain when you’re listening versus reading with your eyeballs. If you are on a mission to regrow your attention span and your ability to do close reading, research suggests you will have an easier time tracking and remembering what you read when it’s on paper books versus ebooks or audio.

But also…audiobooks are real books. Ebooks are real books. If you are most comfortable reading in those formats, embrace that! If that’s your on ramp, great. As long as you’re able to engage with a story, you’re going in the right direction. The fact that you don’t go for a walk three times a week shouldn’t stop you from going once. Just. Start.

And if you’re thinking, “Em, everyone is broke. Where are we getting the money for all these books?”, let me remind you that there are still libraries! And they need you to visit them and check out books to keep from dying out.

There’s also the Internet Archive, and if you’ve only got a little disposable income and are looking to buy, there’s your local used bookstore, or if you’re determined not to leave the house: Thriftbooks. Hell, if you use Amazon, there’s Kindle Unlimited. There’s lots on Kindle Unlimited, in fact. And if you can’t find one book, you really want to read at a reasonable price point (or for free), there is a long backlist of books. Again—spanning hundreds of years. You’re sure to find something.

The plan for how to keep yourself in the reading game is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself, but here’s what I’m currently trying out.

I’ve found that I’m the kind of person who will inevitably read more than one book at a time. Having a “books in waiting” pile in a range of different formats and genres keeps me from getting decision paralysis. On that list I keep: a collection of short stories or essays, a book of poetry, a horror or romance book, and then something a little more challenging, usually litfic or nonfiction. And yes, because otherwise I’ll get super sidetracked, I read those more challenging ones with a paper and pen and sticky notes (just for the books I own, of course—never put sticky notes in a library book!).

And here’s a really important one: I let myself DNF books if I don’t like them and I let myself switch to a different book if I want to read it more than what I’ve got going on currently, so I never stop reading altogether.