How I found my way back to books

Anyone who’s published a book or tried to has had even indispensable friends and family tell them why they’re not going to read it. Fair enough. We all have our own tastes and daily pressures. Also, the Internet requires our constant attention — it’s not going to unravel human society by itself. Eventually, you only half-listen to the apologies from non-readers, like when a flight attendant explains how a seatbelt works. About 10 years ago, though, someone surprised me.
I had sent a book I’d written to Susan Dennard, a best-selling fantasy writer whose brain, novels and newsletter I envied. We were just acquaintances, and I was fishing for favours, but she emailed back graciously: She’d find ways to support my novel but couldn’t crack it open herself because the ability to enjoy books had deserted her. “I am a broken reader,” she said.
It was the first time I saw those words next to each other. In all honesty, my immediate thought was, “She really does not want to read my novel.”
Then, in 2022, the reader in me snapped in half.
Over the years, I thought I’d perfectly isolated what I needed from a novel: some insight into why human beings can’t get out of their own way, a plot but not a cop show, and lyrical but not showoffy writing. But suddenly, I couldn’t finish even half a book. Any book. Nothing held me. Everything annoyed me. Cilantro now tasted like soap.
All this was destabilising because my sense of self and my understanding of the world have largely come courtesy of books.
Depression wants everything it can get its hands on. What’s that thing that always calms you? Oh, it’s reading? Yoink.
As the months rolled by, I was unable to read more than 50 pages of that year’s most heralded books: “Demon Copperhead,” “Trust” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Two of those novels shared the Pulitzer Prize. Two of them will be adapted to the screen. All three were best sellers. I have separated them on my shelf so they don’t trash talk me.
Recently, I texted Susan Dennard to see if our trajectories had been anything alike. She didn’t remember using the phrase that had stuck with me, but she certainly recalled that time in her life: “It started when I hit the hardest point in my career, which was around 2015. I was really struggling on the personal front and also creatively.”
Her dry spell as a reader lasted — even just typing this is painful — five years. Deleting the social media apps on her phone helped more than anything else. But she also began writing less work-intensive novels, her addictive “Luminaries” series about an unlikely monster-hunting society. And instead of trying and failing to read fantasy, she started bingeing a series of historical romances a friend had suggested. The sun gradually came out.
My own losing streak ended in late 2022, after about 10 months. I half-remember a New Yorker cartoon from years ago. A driver is stuck in highway traffic, and a sign on the roadside says something like, “10 Miles: Traffic Inexplicably Speeds Up.”
Writers may be more likely to break than other readers because there’s ego and other occupational hazards involved. But I’ve realised that my troubles weren’t really related to what I do for a living — or even to my 21st-century attention span. They had more to do with the sense of entitlement I’d developed as a reader. It was as if I expected all authors to ask me personally what I wanted before they started typing.
Without realising it, I had put every novelist on probation from word one. I needed to stop thinking that I knew more than the author and give in to whatever ride they had spent years planning. I needed to read slowly and remind myself that if I ended up disliking a book, the earth wouldn’t get sucked into the sun.
In my 20s, my favourite novel was Italo Calvino’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler'. In the first chapter, Calvino cheerily lays out detailed instructions for preparing to read. Sit as comfortably as you can, he says. Remove all distractions from the room, adjust the lighting and tell everybody to leave you alone. In short, drive out every other thought before you begin so that you can “grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation.”
I began rereading “If On a Winter’s Night” the other day, and it made me giddy, as it used to, but it’s not my favourite novel anymore. I can think of books by Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami and José Saramago that hit me harder because they laid bare so much about alienation, inhumanity, societal collapse — all the good stuff. I wouldn’t say I like any one book the best because there’s so much I haven’t tackled yet, though I’m reading at a steady clip again. My favourite novel: I’m still looking for it. — The New York Times

Jeff Giles The writer is a novelist and the former executive editor of Vanity Fair