Reader, if you have a printer then print this article out, step away from the screen and read it in one sitting. I say this because I’ve been thinking about reading, and reading about thinking. They are almost the same thing.
Recently I was in Scarthin Books in the Peak District – you should be there too, as soon as you can – and in the least used room on its topmost floor, in the farthest corner of the highest bookshelf, I discovered a book that belongs in a ghost story. On the spine it said only ‘DIARY 1867’. That is what it is: a thick, clothbound diary with marbled end papers and small-print details of public holidays, market days and country banks that closed a hundred years ago. Its 1867 owner made only one entry, the dull record of a contract for road building. Eighty-five years later in 1952, another hand picked it up, ripped out a handful of pages at the front and began to scrawl untidy notes in ballpoint pen. This user carried on sporadically, impulsively, sometimes holding the page vertical and sometimes horizontal. What they recorded was their reading.
They read Jacquetta Hawkes on archaeology, Tacitus on the Germans and James Alan Rennie on Scottish clans. Whatever they read, they privately mulled over. They noted that Harald Bluetooth converted to Christianity after a priest called Poppo held a red-hot iron rod to prove his faith. They were interested in cheese-rolling in Oxfordshire – ‘The ceremony must originally be part of a fertility cult.’ After a passage about Hebrew hymns, a note instructs: ‘LOOK THIS UP’.*
Just as the smell of bacon tempts the long-time vegetarian, so this glimpse of another person’s careful analysis made me realise how much I miss reflective reading. Thoughtful books are written slowly, and thoughtful readers read them slowly; but our current way of reading is fragmented, fast, divided between many sources. I do much of mine through my ears. My news and poetry recommendations come via socials. Social media is not an evil – yes, there are a lot of dickheads out there but there always were; it’s just that now you can hear them all at once. However, socials deliver news and information piecemeal. Every fascinating article links you to another, in a cycle of momentary engagements. It doesn’t give you a single picture, flawed or real; it gives you a bag of tesserae and asks you to make your own mosaic.
We fall for those glittering fragments because we like them; they are easy to pick up. After all, reading is a pretty newfangled way of taking in information. Our default setting is for the oral and aural. We might aspire to contemplation but we are suckers for stimulus, novelty, the small excitements of a moving image or a short text. Information culture is enriching and exciting. Its crazy-paving is beginning to show up in the literary ecosystem; micro-essays, flash fictions, animated or hybrid or episodic texts. All to the good, but as Maryanne Wolf writes in Reader, Come Home:
Perhaps you have already noticed how the quality of your attention has changed the more you read on screens and digital devices. Perhaps you have felt a pang of something subtle that is missing when you seek to immerse yourself in a once favourite book. Like a phantom limb, you remember who you were as a reader, but cannot summon that ‘attentive ghost’ with the joy you once felt in being transported somewhere outside the self to that interior space.
Wolf recommends a number of strategies – including the idea that you might print out an article you found on the internet, and read it in one sitting.
My Victorian diarist got me thinking. I invited the members of my poetry community The Poetic Licence to join me in a slow poetry experiment, called ‘the monogamous reader’. We would commit to reading only one poet for a month. We would read and re-read; would pay attention, spotting changes in style or theme through the poet’s career. Like that 1950s diary vandal, we reflected and made notes. We rediscovered the naughty pleasure of writing in a published book – annotate, insult it, ask it questions, write WTF, Ginsberg? in the margins. I hoped that this monogamy would lead to a deeper understanding.
It turns out that monogamy is hard; who knew? I was unfaithful to Roddy Lumsden, and judging by his poems I was not the first. Many Poetic Licence subscribers reported sheepishly that they too had flirted with other poets. Others went on holiday with the chosen one, and spent a grim fortnight in their company. But monogamy certainly did bring revelations. Some befriended a poet with whom they had not previously been on good terms. One or two had epiphanies, and a few crushes developed into a full-blown obsession. Familiar poems unfurled, showing us new levels of skill and meaning. Obscure poems became clearer – and vice versa. The basic principle, that we should focus in tightly on one writer, was richly rewarded. The excitement of reading carefully and taking time to reflect on it was palpable.
My 1867 diary now has a third hand interfering in its pages. The first quote I wrote in it was from Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus –
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions – and less likely to see clearly when they fail.
This is not a lament for a past age, but a plea for the retention of an old and useful skill. Writing is a process in which the author freezes their own thoughts. Reading is the process whereby the reader thaws them out and puts them to use. Both processes happen rather slowly. Reading with a pencil in one hand and a notebook at my side felt profoundly interesting. It made me read differently, and better. I recommend it to you, with today’s addition to the diary from Epictetus:
Don’t just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better.
* It’s not all about reading. In an aside, the writer says:
Mrs. Brown tells me that when young she was taken to see her uncle Joe who had just died and on his stomach was a big plate of onions – about four big Spanish onions cut up, she thinks – and she was told that was customary.
Jo Bell is one of the UK’s best-loved poetry mentors. A pioneer of online communities, she now hosts The Poetic Licence, an e-village for those who want support and community without the cost of a Creative Writing MA. Jo is a boater, a Northerner, a poet and, it turns out, a non-fiction writer whose new book Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways will be out with HarperNorth in summer 2025.
Patreon: Jo Bell
