Still Gonna Buy a Million Though

on reading as an author

“How many books do you read a year?” asked my friend Ali last fall, and I laughed nervously, like she was asking for my bra size. “A lot,” I said. “Too many,” I sometimes joke. I don’t know the answer, because I can’t keep track. For some stretches, I’ll read a book a day. Sometimes, depending on how busy things are, I’ll pass straight out before my 8-10pm reading window, for up to a week. But my guess is in the hundreds a year.

This elicits feelings in people, who are wracked with guilt about their own reading habits, and I haven’t figured out how to explain that it’s not any sort of competition, it’s just what I do. If I had a ton of other interests, I’d supplement with those. Being praised for my reading is like being envied for gorging myself on candy until my teeth hurt. Reading is one of my greatest joys, but it’s also my default coping mechanism — to blot out a bad day, to settle the monkey brain, to transport myself somewhere I’d rather be. In moderation, these are all wonderful things. The way I do it, I know it’s often a crutch.

The main problem—and a confession—is that so many books evaporate from my brain after I’ve ingested them. Not all the books, but most of them. I know I’ve read a title when I encounter it again, but have I, really? If I don’t retain anything other than a positive, negative, or neutral impression, does the reading count? Of course there are the books that I savor, the all-timers, the ones I never want to end, and dog-ear, underline and quote. But I’ve always thought of that as a feature of the book, not of my approach.

To love books is to be surrounded by unread stacks: a gajillion I buy, library hauls, galleys generously sent over by publishers and fellow authers— and I need them. They are visual expressions of my identity, this is what people know me for, this is what I know of myself, especially now that books are my actual community. But the piles are also anxiety-inducing, like a to-do list I’ll never finish because, there will always be even more books I must read. My ravenous appetite remains, but the afterglow of consumption is dimishing.

I mention in my book that I remember walking into our local library in London, at five, and being overwhelmed by the number of titles. How am I going to read all these? I asked my mother. One at a time, she told me. “One thing at a time” is a phrase I repeat to my kids (and myself) any time we are overwhelmed, which is often. And I am drawn to the calming drone of it now.

“I read your book in one sitting!” people used to tell my husband after he published his memoir (yes, we are a double-memoir family, we should be a nightmare). He joked that he secretly wanted to reply “Could you read it again? It took me a long time to write.” Now, we don’t actually feel this way. I love when people gulp up my work. It means they connect with it and find it compelling. I like that they might be shirking their duties, or their friends, to read, as I have. It feels strangely intimate to know that I’ve been made such a priority, without even entering a home.

I always figured that writing a book was an arduous undertaking. If I thought it was easy, I’d have started decades ago. But I had never inhabited the role of author, spending years distilling thoughts and feelings, and then sending out into the universe in hopes that someone might pick it up and feel the same. It fundamentally changed me. Now when I pick up a book, I don’t feel the same urge to gobble it up. I want to engage, to give myself time to absorb, and reflect, and take notes, and think deeply about the choices the author had to make in each line and chapter. I’ve been an avid reader since toddlerhood, but not a terribly close one. I have been reading too much too quickly for too long, and like everything else in my life lately, I’d like to slow it down.

My friend Amanda Lund—a wildly talented comedy writer and performer—recently sent me a notebook to congratulate me on the publication of my book. It has a floral cover, and is personalized as “Best Smelling Author.” It’s adorable, and and I’m using it as a physical reading log, as I work my way through one (paper) book at a time. Here are the four books in it so far.

• Laura van den Berg
  ’s State of Paradise, which I read so slowly, partly because I love Florida. The air there reminds me of monsoon season, and it’s never ever boring. Laura made me want to hang out there for a while, even while things got pretty weird.

• At my parents’ near Detroit, I read my friend Nayantara Roy’s debut The Magnificent Ruins, about a young woman in NY whose grandfather leaves her the ancestral home in which she grew up, so she has to go back to Kolkata, and untangle a web of family drama and intrigue. It was so enjoyable — My mother grew up in a joint family compound, and I’ve always been so drawn to complicated eldest daughter themes, especially our roles as family executors and therapists.

• At a (rented) lake house in Northern Michigan, I read Rainbow Rowells’s Slow Dance, about high school best frends who get a chance to deepen their relationshiop as adults. I eagerly await every book she puts out, and it was a delight.

• I just finished This is What it Sounds Like, by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas. Rogers is a neuroscientist and professor at the prestigious Berkelee College of Music, who was previously a multiplatinum music producer (and the sound engineer on the Prince album Purple Rain!). The book sets up a seven-part framework for the way engage with music, and explains why some songs speak to our souls, while others leave us cold. I’ve been recommending it left and right.

I’d be curious to hear how others read, what you’re reading, and whether your reading has changed over the course of your adult life. I wonder if mine will again.

xoxo

Pri