I read Moby Dick

and other things

Today Gabby texted me asking if I’ve read anything good lately. I responded:

• Giovanni’s Room — like, in two sessions. Short, sweet, tragic, amazing writing. You can drink it.

• Master & Margarita, which I haven’t finished because I lost my book in Paris (or, my lover kept it, I haven’t been too bothered). Soviet satire, the devil comes to Moscow, there’s a talking cat and glamorous witchy women introduced exactly in the right way. It’s very fun. Antics. Philosophy, which was the part I was just getting to. Oh well.

• Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. Likely to finish today. It’s about an aging model looking back on her life in Paris and NYC in the 80s. Poetic, very electric. She says something perverted or insane every other page so it’s really engaging. Easily read.

• The Sun Also Rises. I’m addicted to Hemingway describing the 20 cocktails he had and how it made the room spin. Every character in this book is a Hemingway self-insert. Lady Brett Ashley has taught me a lot about how bad I can be as a woman and still be adored.

I also read Whatever by Houlllebocuehque, which is skippable. And Annie Ernaux, quite a few of her short things, who I love. And a translation of Euripides - Alcestic by Ted Hughes, which feels very modern for what it is. Now, I’ve moved a handful of books from the shelf I do not touch to the nightstand where they will be read: Rent Boy by Gary Indiana, A Severed Head by Irish Murdoch, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. That’s what’s up next.

That’s been the bulk of my summer reading list post Moby Dick. Reading Moby Dick fixed my attention span.

If you read this substack I wrote, I was really struggling to read Moby Dick a few months ago. I felt distracted and longed for the days of fully immersive reading. There were a couple of things that worked for me and have let me keep up the habit:

1. Reading more than one book at once

   1. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood to read a tome, but you COULD be in the mood to read. Having something short and silly on standby helps. This is how I read all throughout school, many books all at once. And for some reason when I turned 22 I thought I had to approach everything in life in a linear, start to finish way. Not how my brain works as it turns out. Quite demotivating.

2. Also getting the audio book

   1. I could kickstart a reading session by doing the dishes and listening to my book for like 20 minutes. It gets you “in” the story and makes it more likely you will sit down and read, because reading is faster/ better than listening. Getting “in” is the hard part.

3. Abandoning anything I didn’t want to read.

   1. Once I thought I had a fatigue syndrome but actually when I think about it, I was probably trying to read a book that was really boring. Sometimes you just don’t want to read Middlemarch. Sorry. I think it’s a bad approach to finish every book you start. There are SO many books in the world and our time on earth is limited. Reading is not supposed to be a chore. There’s a big distinction between tackling difficult books (and feeling motivated to do so) versus dragging your tired body through a book that fux with your long term reading habit. Doing too much of the latter will make you hate reading. And maybe that hard book will seem appetizing later.

4. Downloading a meditation app that makes you take a breath before opening social media

   1. It’s called ClearSpace. It’s not always effective against doomscrolling for moi, but it does give me 30 seconds to ask “What am I looking to get on this app that I could get somewhere else?” The thing I’m addicted to is Twitter. So I would just tell myself: “Well, what I really want to do is read, and do I want to read badly written sentences from the worst minds on the planet?” (no offense to everyone I follow) “Or do I want to read some of the best sentences from the most creative minds in history that will make me enthralled, inspired, enraged, frustrated and envious?” And that’s not a tough question to answer.

Now, I’m not by any means a galaxy brain mega-reader. But someday I’d like to be, because I think you have to be to be a good writer. Posting this is lowkey kind of embarrassing. In my defense: I’m a jock! I have a finance degree!

I think with most things in life, if you accept your human-ness and try to work with what you got, you can make a lot of progress. Setting overly ambitious reading goals or getting mad at myself (about how hard it is to make a new habit) would have set me back a ton and I probably wouldn’t have gotten through Moby Dick. Instead I decided simply: I’m a reader. And acknowledged: I’m going to feel resistance within myself as I try to do this.

I visualized myself as a little kid sitting at the kitchen table doing their homework. The little kid doesn’t want to be there, and it’s hard, but you’re the parent and you know better. You can’t really explain to the little kid why they have to know fractions, they just do. A part of me had the big adult reasons for why I want to. Another part of me had been eating glue sticks for the better part of five years — and adult me had to be patient with that child part of me. The child part of me had to grumble but do it anyways. It’s going to probably be this way the rest of my life. And that’s fine :)

-C