The Inconstant Reader

Reflections on changing habits

Don't read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who's yellow and keeps the store

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap. 

Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits (1964)

Detail from The Bookworm (c.1850) by Carl Spitzweg.

Numbers heading south

Last week, I began to see the Substack community posting their reading statistics for the summer. Unable to find my own summary on the app, I consulted the helpbot for guidance, which essentially told me I was hallucinating.

A day later, my numbers appeared, but by then I’d more or less lost interest. However, a quick glance told me that I’d read a lot fewer words than most who’d shared their numbers. 

*

Before this happened, I’d been reflecting on how disruptive the platform has been to my reading habits. I don’t mean disruptive in a positive, tech-bro kind of way. No, I mean plain old disruption, “the action of preventing something, especially a system, process, or event, from continuing as usual or as expected.” 

I’ve never been a fast or especially prolific reader. It took me a full year to work through all of Shakespeare and well over that to read all of Dickens’ novels. But generally I used to read 20 to 30 carefully chosen books in a year, in addition to numerous individual poems, essays, and articles from journals, magazines, or reviews. That seemed like a good rhythm for me. 

Now it can feel as if Substack is almost everything I read, and I still can’t keep up with the current of new essays. And while I don’t keep count, I have probably read fewer than ten books off the platform this year. I truly enjoy and admire much of what I read on Substack, but overall this feels like a big shift in the flow of my reading habits, like a river changing course.

A study of reading habits

Reflecting on or sharing reading habits is nothing new. In 1825, William Hazlitt wrote of fellow essayist Charles Lamb: 

“Mr. Lamb’s taste in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding… His admiration of Shakespear and Milton does not make him despise Pope; and he can read Parnell with patience, and Gay with delight.”¹

Another famous English essayist, George Orwell, was highly preoccupied with the reading habits of others, judging from his classic essays Boys’ Weeklies, Decline of the English Murder, and Bookshop Memories.²

In Boys’ Weeklies, a groundbreaking study of popular writing, Orwell writes of the small newsagent’s shops where the weeklies were bought in the 1930s: “Probably the contents of these shops is [sic] the best available indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks.” 

Nearly two hundred years before, Samuel Johnson sided with the reading tastes of the public when determining good poetry from bad:

I rejoice to concur with the common reader, for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

Woman Reading (1895) by Henri Matisse. Pubic domain via WikiArt.

Reasons for reading

Johnson’s words were used by Virginia Woolf as her epigraph to The Common Reader (second series) (1945). In one of her essays from that collection, The Countess of Pembroke’s Acadia, Woolf examines our motivation for reading: 

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our desire.

And Hazlitt said this of Lamb’s motivation: 

He has read vast folios of controversial divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of style, and to save himself the pain of thinking.

And what are we to make of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance (1955)? If you take this complex and astounding poem to be, in part, about reading, then it suggests that we read to make sense of our world. It also suggests that as we seek the consolation of a single unifying meaning through reading, a heavy burden is thrust upon us:

Everything only connected by "and" and "and."

Open the book…

Open the heavy book.³

I read for joy, for inspiration, for enlightenment. And sometimes for solace. I read Dickens when I feared my mother was about to die. I read Louise Glück to guide me through the shock of grief after my father died. 

Yet there are many other days when I don’t know why I read at all. 

The Reader (1877) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Image in public domain via WikiArt.

Libraries of the mind

My mother was an avid reader; she read popular fiction and was always in the middle of a book, right to the end of her life. My father enjoyed reading too, mostly non-fiction, especially about farming or history. What happened to all that reading after they died? I know their books were dispersed, claimed by family members, or disposed of as part of the house clearance. 

But does the reading go anywhere? What does a lifetime of reading add up to? What will be the final shape or purpose of the library that has formed in our minds? 

I always thought rereading favourite books would be a key consolation of my later years. I still hope it will. But as I move further into my seventh decade, I occasionally glance at favourite long novels such as Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943), glowering at me from the bookcase, and think, Will I ever read them again?

Serious burdens

Will it matter, in the end, how much we read or reread? 

WH Auden famously wrote, 

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper.⁴

We could say the same of our reading: It makes nothing happen.

Yet Auden, in the next lines, which are quoted less often, went on to say that poetry 

flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

I wonder: Perhaps reading is also “a way of happening,” an indeterminate state of being or becoming?

It is certainly a joy, like a surging river, but it is also, to echo Auden’s words, busy with grief; perhaps reading bears responsibilities too.

All rivers carry more than just water, and reading carries more than just the words. 

The poet Peter Porter ended his elegant poem The Cost of Seriousness (1978) with the lines

The dead may pass

their serious burdens to the living.⁵

For many of us, reading is how that happens. It is a burden we receive with joy and remembrance but also, perhaps, with weariness. 

Sometimes the load is heavy. Just as a river becomes still with age as it meanders over the final plain on its way to the sea, sometimes dotting the landscape with lakes or dispersing into a delta, so for us the moment may come when our reading, too, needs to pause and let us put down for a while our serious burdens.

1. From Elia, published in Spirit of the Age (1825).

2. All are in the excellent selection of his essays, Shooting an Elephant (Penguin, 2003).

3. Published in Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955).

4. From In Memory of WB Yeats (1939).

5. The title poem of The Cost of Seriousness (OUP, 1978).