Everyone wants to read more, but finding the time and motivation is hard. Here is how I found my motivation.
My attention span is garbage for a lot of things, but I re-learned how to let myself get lost in a book.
It feels a little lame to say I had to put a lot of effort into reading consistently when it's supposed to be something done for enjoyment. But I also think it's important to destigmatize the need to put in that effort in the first place.
A Lifetime of Reading
In my April Novel Reading List and my April Physical Comic Reading List, I allude to my reading habits at different parts of my life. I think, for the most part, my reading habits have been informed more by necessity than by any desire. College might be an exception, but only because it was the only time in my life that I have not been beholden to someone else's schedule.
With the major exception of the Harry Potter books, I only read novels for school in my adolescence. In elementary school, I had trouble focusing as I read and got distracted by the rivers between words on a page. In middle school, I was introduced to Rumiko Takahashi. I think it was one of the Ranma 1/2 books, but the first volumes I bought myself were the Mermaid Saga books. I never had a huge collection of manga, but it was fairly sizable. I would also go to a Barnes and Noble or Borders store and read manga without buying anything.
When I was in high school, fan translation groups were everywhere. By the time I was in college, I had read gigabytes of manga and had many gigabytes worth still to read. Once I graduated, many of these groups struggled with issues related to piracy and copyright, so they disappeared or made it extremely difficult to access their translations. They provided a service during a time when your ability to read Japanese limited your access to a lot of manga. But, when it became profitable for companies to start localizing those same titles, the work these groups had done to cultivate those fans, and sometimes entire communities, was disregarded. But, that's a topic in itself.
My point in mentioning these fan translations is to note that the decline in my reading (manga) coincided with the decline in the fan translation groups I followed. I got a shitty retail job after college that didn't bring in enough to cover basic expenses, let alone support my reading habit. My life also changed a lot in those few years. My parents divorced a year before I graduated, and I moved 400 miles away the year after I graduated. My attention was almost exclusively focused on finding work and doing that work.
The routine I eventually settled into didn't involve much "reading" at all. I used to work a lot with my hands, which meant my eyes were also occupied. But, I could listen to anything I wanted, so I listened to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks. One of the jobs I had before and into the beginning of the pandemic allowed me to listen for more than 12 hours a day, including my commute. At 2x speed, I listened to The Witcher series in a week, the Remembrance of Earth's Past Series in another week, all the Dune books written by Frank Herbert in two weeks, and the first seven books of The Wheel of Time series in another handful of weeks, just to list a few.
What was Stopping Me?
When I consumed an audiobook nearly every day, I was working a crazy amount. I didn't have much energy to do anything outside of work, let alone sit down and focus on words on a page. After a page or two, I would get distracted, fall asleep, or just reread the same paragraph repeatedly.
When I was drafting this post, The Book Leo published declining attention spans vs. the rising popularity of reading on YouTube. The conclusion she draws, after digging into news reporting, the self-reporting of her fans, and different academic articles, is that our attention spans are not shrinking at all. Really, we are seeking coping mechanisms and means to escape our current feelings and anxieties. Books can fill that need just as well as short-form content, but we have to break free of the mechanisms short-form content uses to monopolize our attention.
I have never been super engaged in social media, and am more likely to fall down Wikipedia or Youtube rabbit holes than swiping through Instagram or Ticktock. But, I think bite-sized content is still enticing.
The length of a book and the mental energy it seemed to require of me were always overshadowed by the passive enjoyment of another archeology documentary on YouTube. Following characters and plot lines and keeping all the imagery straight felt like a task I had to complete, rather than part of the enjoyment of reading. TV shows and movies remind you of these important bits of information in various ways, because you can't go back to another point in the story to remind yourself why something might be earth-shattering for a particular character.
When I left the job that let me inhale audiobooks and made the choice to write, I felt it was important for me to actually look at words on a page, and was frustrated that I struggled so much to do that. How was it possible for me to create the space for my brain to enjoy reading?
The Solution
Around that time, Answer in Progress published why you stopped reading on Youtube. Without depriving them of the viewing hours they deserve, the way Sabrina Cruz's experiment reframed how I thought about reading was actually quite simple.
Somehow, it never occurred to me to listen to audiobooks as I read. As far as I was concerned, these were two distinct activities, and there was no reason to combine them. I read from a book when I could, and listened to a book when my eyes and hands were otherwise occupied.
In reality, listening to the words as I read allowed me to actually focus on what I was reading in a way I don't think I could ever do before. I like audiobooks because the passive consumption of narrative allows my imagination to really run wild. But reading allows for re-reading and creates space to spend more time with any given passage to digest it if I want. As a writer, engaged reading also gives me insight into how the author constructs sentences and uses punctuation to create their narrative. This process also enables me to see how choices related to format, such as font, can alter my reading experience. Transitions marked by asterisks, footnotes, or a change in typeface don't translate well to audiobooks, and those transitions can sometimes be jarring as a result.
Amusingly, this "epiphany" is not actually something new for me. When I was in elementary school, this is exactly how I learned to really read. I had other reading and writing difficulties beyond seeing the rivers (including mirror writing), and to help me along, my parents would check out audiobooks from the library. This was a time when they still came on records and tapes.
Reading
There are still plenty of times when I only listen to an audiobook or only read from a text, but I try to make it a habit of doing both together. I don't think anyone should stick to a method so rigidly that they can't be in the moment and do what feels right. I still like to listen to books while I drive, especially on long drives. Textbooks lend themselves to jumping around to various places in the text, so reading along to an audiobook isn't always the most productive way to absorb the material.
Reading like this is a nice way to shut out the world, and focus on spending time on what I want. I read more quickly, retain more, and both of these facts empower me to pick up my next book. And, in the quiet hours of the morning when I wake up before my alarm, it is nice to snuggle back into bed and read, along with masterful narration that pulls me deeper into the narrative.
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