Jealous of what a reader you are. Do you have any tips or routines? I used to be such a reader but I feel like brain rot culture has taken over my ability to pay attention to anything lol
Hi! Yes, I sure do. I struggle with reading.
1. Getting out of the habit of watching reels helped me get out of a major block a year and half ago. Which sucks because my friends love sending funny shit to me but I found that I would just get home from work and scroll mindlessly because my brain was tired after work and I couldn’t think or produce or take in any more information which brings me to my second point:
2. Get to know the rhythms of your brain. There’s times during the day it’s more able to absorb information. For me, that’s before work. For a while I’d wake up at 5-6am so I could get 3-4 hours of me time in where my brain was alert and awake. I found it was more productive to sleep early (since my brain is useless in the evenings) and use that time to actually rest, then wake up early alert and read then.
3. Because I read multiple things at the same time (a tip in itself!) I set timers. 10 minutes on this book, 10 minutes on the next, 10 minutes on the third book. This makes it less daunting and also kind of appeals to my attention span. What I usually find is that the knowledge that I’ll have to switch soon ends up triggering the part of my brain that can deeply focus, it’s sort of like how you get the urge to clean your entire room just when you have to leave the house for work or something. I don’t know what it is or why that’s the case.
4. Is your environment working for you? I find myself more able to focus in certain spaces. Some are too silent, some are too noisy, I like just the right amount of background noise.
5. Reading is a muscle. Just as you mentioned how our attention atrophies when we sit around consuming shortform media online, it strengthens as we continue to exert ourselves in reading a book.
6. It’s silly, but I like to develop imaginary relationships with the author of any text I’m reading, esp. with theory. That makes it more fun and less intimidating. Marx is a father to me— he’s boring and dense, but has important things to say. Lenin is like my cool stylish uncle, Kristeva is my mysterious spinster aunt, Simone de Beauvoir is my sister, Sylvia Plath is my homely best friend who’s jealous of me because I’m hotter than her, but whose writing I envy in return, etc.
7. There is no “right way” to read a book, esp. theory. Start in the middle. Jump to the beginning, skip five pages, read backward, if it’s a good text ultimately it will draw you in and you’ll consume every last bit. Let your curiosity pull you in, reading shouldn’t be punitive and it feels that way often because of how we’ve been taught to approach a book.
8. Don’t be afraid to use resources on the internet to supplement your reading. It’s not cheating to look things up, develop a roadmap, run your understanding by other interpretations of the text.
9. Annotate, but not in a boring way taught in schools. Books should be a source of play and creativity. Write in the margins, talk to your book, use it as a diary. “I’m drunk” is my favorite annotation in a book. Often times my annotations are also just lists of associations my brain makes while reading a sentence or paragraph, and nothing to do with trying to extract deeper meaning from it. You and I could read the same book and have our own universe of associations which influence our experience of the text.
