The Reading Sickness

My husband is not a reader. While I wade up to my eyes through stories, he stays dry. We are different people, and that is fine, but I have wondered for years precisely why he doesn’t love to read–to me it seems so natural. To me, it is necessary. He has told me sometimes, that when he begins to read a book, it overtakes him. He can’t pull his mind out of the story. It isn’t a good feeling, he says. He just wants to be done.

Of course, that sounds like page-turning to me. That feeling when a story catches you and pulls you on–let’s read a little more, we say. Just one more chapter, the kind of feeling that made my dad (also never a fiction reader) rush through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in one night, and that great drive to find out what is coming next, it is excitement and engagement and interest and maybe a little bit obsession. For us writers, isn’t that the goal?

Reading can make you sick

Currently, I am plowing my way through the second book in Liu Cixin’s science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. This expansive saga, more popularly known by the title of its Hugo-winning first novel, The Three-Body Problem, follows humanity on its slow discovery of and then preparations for battle against an invading alien fleet. The science, mathematics, sociology, and Chinese history that Liu weaves through these novels are fascinating. His thoughtful, logically-developed portrayal of how human societies might truly react to the discovery of alien intelligence gives the trilogy a kind of credibility that I don’t always feel when reading science fiction.

Yet as I scroll on through my e-reader, I cannot help feeling that I wish I were done. I wish these novels were behind me. I am already sick of them. My reading the last few days has become more a compulsion than a joy.

I am reading far faster than my norm. Normally, I read five, six pages before bed. I fall asleep. I don’t touch the book again until the following evening, and sometimes I realize I was so tired the night before that I need to skip back and reread. The result is that one book routinely follows me a month or more. I looked back at my Goodreads list. In 2020, I made it through 21 books, but a third of those I had to read for school and raced through in a fury so that I would be ready to help students with them. The Three-Body Problem I listened to in a rush over the course of a week. This second installment, The Dark Forest, I am reading in text, but at this pace I will make it through within the next two weeks.

The fast pace comes because the book is always knocking at my mind’s door. Ordinarily, my reading occupies an idle corner of my mind. I might stop by to think about what I am reading for a while during the day, but ordinarily it is confined to those cozy nighttime excursions into other worlds. I look forward to my reading, like a treat at the day’s end, alone under the covers, the door closed (my husband is a night owl), a soft light, an electric candle, a cup of water, just me and that book.

Right now, though, the reading is an obsession. The book has taken hold of my mind and is dragging me through itself. I am lesson-planning at my desk. What is going to happen? I am walking back from school. What is Luo Ji’s plan going to be? I am working on my own writing. But are the humans going to ruin themselves before the aliens arrive?

This ever-presence is aggravating. It distracts me. It also makes me adopt, at times, the distasteful kind of life-or-death, utilitarian thinking that runs through Liu’s novels. It has infected me. I see it as a sickness. My husband’s solution to this sickness has been simply not to read. I think I finally understand what he means.

The Sick List

This is certainly not the first time I’ve experienced the Reading Sickness. Paging back through memory, I know The Hunger Games did it to me. So did The Overstory, Call Me by Your Name, The Power, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Ender’s Game, The Da Vinci Code, Cloud Atlas. I look at his list. I notice the prevalence of science fiction. I notice action, conflict-heavy stories. I notice imaginative worldbuilding. I scan those titles, and my mind spins. I remember my obsessions, the morning commutes when I was teaching in Minnesota when I puzzled through those stories. I flipped those pages in a fever. I remember the relief and concomitant despair at finally being done.

I notice that many of these books (though not all) I remember fondly. The sickness is not always wholly bad. Sometimes the fascination, the infection with the idea, inspires me to rethink the world, and the intensity of the reading experience keeps me engaged in that introspection, often long after the book is finished. I think that for me what distinguishes these cases from the sugar rush of others is my perception of something deeper to the novel, some important idea, new way of seeing the world, something I want to integrate into myself. In cases where I just want to be done, it is only a page-turner. It feels empty.

I expect that the novels on my Sick List are different than yours. I expect we each have our own strange cocktail that makes us unable to set the book down. But I would not be surprised to see common threads of conflict, action, high stakes, the things contemporary writing advice hammers into us. To write a “page turner” is seen as a great goal. I’m not so sure it really is.

Is it just me?

When I was a child, my Halloween candy lasted until March. My mom has never let me forget this. “Are you really my son,” she would sometimes say. “Where is your sweet tooth?” Maybe I have a lower tolerance for sugar, and for excitement, than do others. Maybe I become too quickly overwhelmed, and my head tips back reeling, and that piece of chocolate makes me feel more gross than it does good. Maybe I’ve got no sweet tooth for page-turners, and that’s why I spend most of my time reading slower, calmer literary fiction, and I love it. Maybe that’s why what I write is slow and measured, with gaps to think. Maybe I am strange.

Over the last year, in spurts punctuated with months-long gaps, my husband and I have been reading aloud to one another Barry Lopez’s Horizon. Lopez died in December 2020, which made Horizon his final book. It is a beautiful and measured and compassionate voyage through the places Lopez has found meaningful throughout his life, from Cape Foulweather in Oregon, to Skraeling Island in the Canadian Arctic, to the Galápagos, and on. Through these wild places, Lopez traces the history of humans’ understanding of the world, and also humans’ capacity for destruction, for causing one another to suffer. He tries to comprehend Western cultural hegemony, of which he emphasizes his own inherent part, and attempts to chart a path into the future where we can right wrongs, know others truly and not objectify, be better. The writing is exquisite. The ideas are vast and tender and unflinching. Lopez brings so much historical, artistic, cultural, and scientific knowledge to bear that we have the feeling as we read that we are seeing the whole world. We also have the feeling, constantly, that we only partially understand him. We have a running list of vocabulary that we have never seen before. We often pause and say to each other, “What is he saying?” I want to see things with his eyes. The experience of reading Horizon could not be more different from these page-turners. Rather than sugar, it is slow-cooked, deep-flavored, nourishing food. And it is also the experience of reading it together, I’m sure, with the person I most love, and talking about it together, and doing it slowly over the course of more than a year, that gives it meaning. A real journey.

If I am strange, if what I want from reading violates the norm, I suppose at this point I must accept it. Maybe it will cost me my publishing dreams. But I also think that to measure a book’s value by its propensity to make people sick, I say that’s unfortunate. I say that the best literature engages subtly with the heart, and does so slowly, makes a journey and not a race, takes the reader’s hand for a calm walk through the world and doesn’t yank us to the end. We savor a passage or a word. We smell the language. We taste it and say, “Oh!” The sun is going slowly down. We might have to do this walk again tomorrow, because we were too tired and forgot. We’ve begun to fall asleep. That’s fine. That’s perfect.