These are notes from a quiet winter. I had decided, mostly out of exhaustion, to read for three months without trying to get anywhere. No reading list, no goals, no project. Just the books that were nearby, in the order they appeared.
The notes below are what survived.
Attention is not the same as concentration. Concentration is what you do when you are trying to finish something. Attention is what is left over when you stop trying.
A friend told me, last December, that she had begun rereading the books she loved as a teenager. She did not expect to like them. She expected to feel embarrassed by them. What she found instead was that she had been right, at fifteen, about almost everything that mattered to her — and had spent twenty years forgetting. The books had not changed. She had spent the twenty years catching back up.
I am suspicious of any reading practice that treats books as units to be consumed. Books are not units. The good ones spread out into the rest of your life and stain things. You can finish a book in three hours and live inside it for five years.
On the slow read
The hardest thing about reading slowly is that you cannot tell, for a long time, whether it is working. A fast reader has finished the book. A slow reader has, at the end of the same week, read forty pages and underlined two sentences. The slow reader looks, to anyone watching, like someone who has not done very much.
I do not know how to defend this except to say: the two underlined sentences sometimes turn out to be the only thing you remember a year later. The other thirty-eight pages were the work of finding them.
I came out of the winter with no specific opinions to report. I had read a great deal of poetry, a few novels, one book of essays I will probably reread every year for the rest of my life, and one book I disliked so much I gave up on page 60.
That was the whole shape of it. It did not, I think, prove anything. But I notice that I am calmer now, in a way that does not have a clear cause, and I suspect the winter is part of it.