a reader’s resolution

Dear Tiggy,

It’s taken me a while to get back to you, and I apologise for that. You asked, quite some time ago now, if anyone had set reading goals for 2010. At the time, I hadn’t; but I’ve been thinking about your challenge a lot since then.

I mean, I certainly have writing goals. I’m constantly setting myself writing goals: I want to write more, to write better and to relish the true joy that comes from trying to do so. I want to be more reflective, more genuinely prepared to prune and edit, more willing to refine work that so often needs refining. I don’t mind if it’s published or performed (to a room of three friends or three hundred), but there’s something important – to me at least – in trying to rise above my gimcrack tendencies and deliver something humble but beautiful. I don’t need to win any prizes, but I do want to feel like I’ve work hard on something worth working for.

But reading goals?

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life when I haven’t loved reading. But I’ve never felt compelled to find my own “100 Books to Read Before…” list and to start working through it. I’ve loved reading widely and with a sense of recklessness, particularly when reading for pleasure. Lately, however, as my life has become more frenetic, more digital perhaps, I find myself reading in a very different way. Rarely do I find myself sitting with a cup of tea on my front porch, listening to the cyclists passing along the creek and turning the pages of a good novel. I no longer get the newspaper delivered. In the name of cutting down fewer trees, I switched to online subscriptions over paper journals. Since swapping my morning tram ride for a bike ride, I’ve even lost my half hour standing read. Though I’m still a member of several libraries, I can’t remember the last time I went to one for anything other than internet access and actually borrowed a book.

Instead, without really observing it, it’s gotten to the point where I’m maintaining four or five blogs (I can’t remember how many right now) and managing three twitter accounts and opening four email addresses, I’ve subscribed to god knows how many feeds, I read several newspapers on my i-phone during snatched moments in coffee queues and have a stack of at seven novels lying neglected on my bedside table. These days I feel like I barely crack the spine of a book before I’ve fallen asleep and lost my page. When I combine this with the several reports and journal articles a week that are required for my professional reading, the effect is truly bewildering.

To be honest, I’ve begun to feel rather bloated and nauseous with the amount of reading I’m doing. Just as a person can grow obese from over-eating, I’ve grown corpulent and rotund from gorging myself on books and blogs and graphic novels and magazines and feeds and the whole media buffet. I feel sometimes like I’m sitting in front of the reading refrigerator with an empty tub of icecream on my lap, handfuls of gelatinous pasta strewn across the floor, just about to open my gullet for another bite of baked cheesecake with cream.

Then, unexpectedly, on a recent visit to Papua New Guinea for work, I found myself stuck for several days in my very small, very cramped hotel room during a bout of tropical storms. The television didn’t work. The internet didn’t work. My mobile telephone was out of credit and I didn’t know anyone to call.

What happened?

I read three books in four days. One of them, I read twice.

The first, Tim Winton’s “Breath” (my repeat offence), was devoured in several easy swallows, as I often find is the case with Tim’s work. Listening to the endless tropical rain, I tried to conjure what Australia looked like in the summer and remembered watching a four-hour adaptation of “Cloud Street” that I had never wanted to end.

The second book was an act of pure desperation: “The Jury Must Die”, a typical holiday “leave behind” from someone who thought it would be nice to travel fourteen hours on a plane to read a really average murder mystery. Ignore the tropical paradise, honey, let’s think about people in gritty, edgy New York who are plotting to kill each other in twisted, innovative and page-turning ways. It was a piece of crap. I read it anyway.

And finally, “Wiley’s Island or Island Blong Wiley”, a small but unusual book written and self-published by an American naval recruit who found himself lost at sea for fifteen days and stranded for several months during World War II on one of the very small island atolls where my NGO is currently working. Personal memoirs of very humble and very ordinary man, each chapter of “Wiley’s Island” was written from three perspectives: 1. as events happened at the time, 2. as Wiley reflects on them now, and 3. as history contextualises them. The slightly clunky effect of which is to create a rather curious repetition as Wiley writes and re-writes his unusual story, only to erase it against the epic narratives of the time.

During these four days, however, I read not a single newspaper, blog, feed, journal article, comic, poem or magazine. Surprisingly I did not feel sick to the stomach with reading despite having passed at least five straight hours each day doing so and having completed some rather hefty days a work at the same time. Instead, I felt light and clear. As if I might possibly be able to eat another morsel of writing, and to appreciate and savour it for whatever richness it had on offer.

So, Tiggy, you asked if anyone had reading goals. Finally, I do.

I’m going on a reading diet. A slow-media diet.

I’m going to unhook myself from at least two of my blogs (Lord, grant me the strength for more) and to sanction off just one morning a week for tending to my various electronic personas. I know the wretched Twitterverse will keep on expanding whether my silly drivel appears in it or not. Though I adore my daily fix of some blogs, I’m going to trim a few that have been sprouting like intellectual weeds. I’m going to unsubscribe to all the feeds that I keep “meaning” to read but never really do. I’m sure there’s something more to be gained than just a few seconds of time if I don’t have to “mark all as read” any longer. Some sense of clarity, some freedom from reading delusion.

Once I get done with all that, I’m going to take a small rest. Just a few days with no reading at all. A small fast so that I merit the considered feast.

Then, just like a slow food diet, I think I’ll start with some low-book-miles reading – namely the seven books already sitting beside my bed. I won’t force myself. No sense in finishing something you’re not enjoying just to prove you’ve read it (To whom? What for? That bestseller list will keep.) When gradually I build up more strength, I’m going to start coming back to the State Library, to sit under that lovely womb of light (link to hell and awe) and perhaps pick up the latest copy of that journal I used to find clogging my to read list. I’ll thumb a few pages, feeling the delightful physical weight of all that writing and then I’ll give it an hour or so – not the length of a tram journey, not the queue time between latte and long black, not five minutes between meetings – an hour or more, if I find it in me, and I’ll read.

Fingers crossed it pans out.

Don’t worry, Tiggy, you’re no intellectual weed, I’ll still be reading you – but I hope you won’t mind if I visit less frequently and then perhaps I can savour your words more.

Thanks again for inspiring me,

Eleanor