In the last calendar year, my wife has read at least 65 books. They are mostly novels, with a couple of non-fiction audiobooks sprinkled in, and this number is pretty typical for her last many years. The reason I can quote an exact number is because she keeps meticulous records -- she responds, in writing, to everything she reads. She notes what worked about the book, what didn't, and what she learned. She shares it with me and nobody else. She's done this for almost 20 years now.
Stop for a second and, I don't know, react to that paragraph. How do you take it? First off, I assume almost everyone reading this knows my wife and therefore knows that this is part of her professional practice. And second off, you might therefore dismiss it as something you yourself would never even consider adopting as a practice, in the same way that I never considered adopting the practice of shooting 1000 free throws a day in order to get good at being a basketball player. The world is full of anecdotes like this -- if only you would devote yourself to some difficult practice in the way that this other incredibly successful person has, you too could be that successful, etc. etc. etc. Is this true? I have no idea. I don't know you that well.
If you've been to any of my recent shows, you know that I spend a lot of time engaging with the mind of British polymath Naomi Alderman. She is currently, on Substack, hosting a Couch-to-5K for reading. It more or less directly follows from the things she's talked and written about in the last several years, and that I've talked about regarding the human mind and its (complete lack of) adaptation to the realities of the internet and AI. Yesterday, at the end of hosting an hour long virtual silent reading, attended by about 90 people from around the world, she posed the question, "okay, now what? How do we continue this?" A few people have suggested variations on book clubs. But the question stopped me, because it's a hard question.
Naomi isn't looking to reinvent bookclubs, I don't think. They already exist (and they're great, they keep our family housed, fed, clothed, and God bless you, bookclubs). Naomi is trying to develop an exercise program, one for the human brain. We humans mostly find ourselves no longer in an agrarian context where we have to heavy labor and survive periods with little food. So we have to get off the couch and run 5Ks in order have bodily health and alignment. Likewise we're in a totally different information context now, one that wants to feed us all the information all the time and one which is not conducive to deep engagement with text, or with the world.
The goal of a Couch-to-5K is not to run a 5K and then be done. The goal is to make running a 5K the new set point. It is to make running a 5K something you do every week, and then twice a week, and then you graduate up to 10Ks and so on. And the other goal is this: for the runner to discover that actually running the 5K isn't a chore. Yes, it requires energy, and yes it taxes your body in various ways, but at the same time you discover its new capabilities and that those capabilities are, actually, quite euphoric to experience. And so it is too, you may have heard tell, with reading.
In that metaphor, you might think of my wife's reading practice as being an ultra-marathoner. You probably aren't going for that, though if you can follow the metaphor and imagine the strength and conditioning of an ultra marathoner, you might begin to imagine the intellectual capacity of my wife's brain (and, I don't know, as the world's most direct observer of same I would say it's a pretty worthy thing to aspire to). I think the idea of reading an actual book for an actual hour every actual day is not only reasonable, it might be something close, in the current information context, to a moral imperative. It might by incumbent on every human mind that is able to do so to get back into reading shape, as fast as is (literally) humanly possible.
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