This Might Hurt a Little: How do I read like I did when I was younger?
I've got some thoughts on that!
Welcome to my advice column, This Might Hurt a Little which is a regular recurring guest in the Pretend it’s a Newsletter universe. All questions are reader submitted and answered to the best of my ability. My qualifications for this are as follows:
In a ceremony hosted by my friends I was awarded the Pick Me Up Mom, I’m Scared! Award for Strength and Stability and presented with a spray painted gold phone to mark the victory.
I am a Sagittarius with a heavy Capricorn presence in my birth chart.
I care a great deal.
In short: I have opinions, and I am happy to share them.
I promise to be enthusiastic, inquisitive, and even keeled in my responses but, fair warning: This might hurt a little.
Dear Chelsea,
I hope this question isn’t too simple to answer, but you said there were no dumb questions and I trust you. How do you read? I feel like I’m too distracted to make a serious habit of reading, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I was younger. I know you read a lot and it seems like you love it. Any pointers on diving back in?Sincerely,
Desperately wants to be in a book club
This question isn’t too simple at all. It’s a great question, and something I’ve been meaning to write a full fledged newsletter about for a long (long!) time so thank you for asking it—it gives me an excuse to sit down and form my thoughts into something digestible on a topic that means a lot to me.
I think if I had to sum up an answer in a few words it’s this: find a book that holds your attention span and begs you to read it. It seems simple, but I assure you that I don’t think it is. It’s actually pretty complicated. There are two things at play here—your attention span and your interest in the content. I’ll cover both of these things, and I’ll give you some recommendations as well.
I want to first spend a little airtime on the world we live in. If you’re anything like me, your day is full of distractions. Everything is yelling at you to pay attention to it all at once. Ads for this, email marketing newsletters for that. There’s always something to scroll, always something begging for your time. So many things are lying in wait to steal your time, and many of them are, by design, shinier and more appealing than reading. This gets increasingly complicated if you have children, or are in school while working, or you’re just plain going through it.
One of the things I’ve been working on lately is increasing my attention span. In theory this feels incalculably difficult, but in practice it’s pretty simple. I set a timer and I try to focus on only one thing at a time for the duration of the timer. This helps me in many areas of my life, and has worked like a charm to lengthen the amount of focused time I can spend on a thing. I think this might come in handy if you find yourself distracted as often as I do.
Next, we need to find something that you actually want to read. This is not the time to get aspirational. What did you enjoy reading when you were younger? What held your attention? It may be worth revisiting some of that literature. There’s no moral high ground on the perceived quality of reading here. We are in the business of habit building, and to get you in the habit we need to pull from the things that really interest you. I want you to choose something that will pull you back into it, so that the structure of your day begins to form pockets of time for reading because you want to know what happens next. There are several series that have done this for me in the past, and none of them are highbrow. Boxcar Children, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and most recently A Court of Thorns and Roses all did this for me. The other cross-section of high interest and ease of readability in my stack are memoirs, and often celebrity memoirs. I will devour them. If ever I’m trying to get my reading habit back, I turn to something I can sink my teeth into, something I can lose myself in. Without fail it works.
I am always searching for literature that I can devour.
I am reminded of a great newsletter from Rosecrans Baldwin, citing novelist Rufi Thorpe’s criteria for judging Tournament of Books participants.
Subject: Am I interested in what the book is about?
Is it drugs: Did I lose consciousness while reading it? I’m still chasing the absolute narcotic of the Sweet Valley High books.
Gay: I just like gay things better, I don’t stand behind it, I just happen to like gay things more.
Cerebral: I’m a nerd, I like thinking, I will read a whole book for one penetrating insight.
Characters: I know it’s not popular to say, but I want to like the fucking characters. I can’t be rolling my eyes every other page at their weenie-ish ways.
Plot: As a reader, I’m like a literal minded eight-year-old and plot holes get to me. Going to the movies with me is awful, I’m continually whispering things like, “But why would he do that?”
Does it vibrate strangely? This is the most ineffable category, but also the most important to me. Is the work so singularly itself that it has transcended in some way?
Is it drugs? Does it vibrate strangely? I’ve talked about this to so many of my friends IRL that it’s probably tired to them at this point, but these two criteria are what I crave and what I aim for.
Right now I’m in the habit of reading between 75-100 pages in a sitting. It’s just how I like to accomplish getting through books. My to-be-read pile is vast, and I’m trying to burn through it. I read for a little bit in the morning, and then again in the afternoon. I don’t read at night unless I am fully sucked into the story. My energy is too low and my attention span is too short to be optimal for reading after about 6pm. I know I am a daytime reader. I would suggest you figure out the times of day you have the energy and attention span to read, and then try to make space in that part of your day.
Sometimes I can get through an entire book in a day. Yesterday I read Gus Moreno’s debut novel This Thing Between Us over the course of the day. It was captivating, and anytime I needed a computer break I picked it up.
Here are some recommendations* of books that I find to be drugs, that held my attention well and some short words about them:
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood - A hilarious coming of age memoir about a woman whose father is a priest. I picked this up after reading a card at Book People in Austin, TX that recommended it by saying
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman - A dystopian novel about womanhood, life, love and death. It’s indescribable, really. I think about the main character all the time. I think everyone should read this book.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Mass - Hot & horny dark romance, a gateway drug into the genre.
How To Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee - A collection of essays by one of my favorite authors. I read it annually.
How To Do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell - A great book about deprioritizing social media and reprioritizing the world you live in.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner - A shattering memoir about what it means to lose your mother and a thousand other things. It’s also beautiful.
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch - another book I couldn’t help but rip through in a day. Starts out very normal and dissolves into madness (an arc I LOVE).
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino - a collection of essays, all of them drugs, some of them about drugs.
If you want specific book recommendations (you, the reader or you, the person who submitted this question) please feel free to email me. I love recommending books.
I hope this helps!
*All linked books are affiliate links for Bookshop.org and I earn a small commission from them should you purchase. My personal practice is getting a book from the library first and then purchasing it if I loved it. I highly suggest this practice.
To submit a question for a future issue of This might hurt a little… you can either email me at hello@chelsealainefrancis.com or you can submit anonymously below!
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Great tips on increasing your reading time/ability. I love that you mentioned thinking about what you liked reading when you were younger!