For about as long as I’ve been aware of my own mortality, I’ve had a mental list of books I should get round to reading. You know the sort of thing: various Russians meditating on free will and religion, something by a Brontë sister, maybe Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire if I ever manage to retire. And yes, Austen, obviously Austen, a writer my mum constantly encouraged me to read when she was still chatting to me every week, and one I spent a shameful decade or so failing to get into after she died.
More recently, I’ve had the same struggles as everyone else with the cesspitisation of social media. On a long enough timeline, pretty much every platform goes the same way: a quick nudge of the sliders to encourage more engagement, a few bad actors doing a bit of bot-farming and the whole thing collapses in on itself. I’m not sure precisely how many hours I’ve spent carefully composing replies to obvious trolls or worrying about life because I’m being force-fed the worst people in the world’s opinions, but it’s definitely too many. Worse, nothing seemed to keep me completely away: I could set myself time limits, install blockers, delete my accounts, but somehow I would keep sneaking back, spending the last 20 minutes of every evening despairing about the state of the world.
Eventually, I had an idea. In nutrition circles, there’s a strategy called “crowding out” your diet: adding in more and more healthy food until there’s simply no room for the junk. Eat four eggs at breakfast and an apple for elevenses, and a mid-morning custard cream doesn’t cross your mind. I decided to do the same with books: by committing to reading for two or three hours a day, I would leave myself with no time for online rage, recriminations and doom-scrolling. I would crowd out the Tweetstorms and embrace the literary greats, and everything would be fine.
Reader, it was not that easy.
The thing about apples is that, while they might be less moreish than biscuits, they are still a lot easier to digest than Dostoevsky. There are little tricks you can use to make yourself read, of course: the best one I’ve found is to make it easier to get to a book than a screen, whether by piling up reading matter on every horizontal surface at home, always keeping a book in your bag, or hiding your phone in a drawer. But ultimately, to read more books, at some point you have to actually sit down and read them, which is where every carefully curated bit of advice falls apart.
There’s an episode of Peep Show where the feckless, TV-loving Jez is trying to read Wuthering Heights in under a day, in order to impress a potential girlfriend. His flatmate Mark, watching like a vulture, assesses the situation perfectly: “You probably feel like looking away from the page now, don’t you? Don’t look away.”
Tackling the western canon felt like this discussion was endlessly repeating itself in my scrolling-addicted brain, my prefrontal cortex at war with my gratification-seeking limbic system. I’ve always been a pretty good reader, but there’s a difference between speed-flipping through the latest pop-sci blockbuster and getting to grips with the 19th-century greats.
Austen was my Everest, and the struggle really was uphill. After a couple of years reading staccato sentences from aspiring LinkedInfluencers, diving into endless semicolons and subordinate clauses feels like going from a McDonald’s happy meal to a whole head of cauliflower: you know which is better for you, but it’s too much to bite off in one go. The first book I tackled was Emma, and I had to force myself through the first two chapters: page after page of character names, relationships and parenthetical asides, and not a bullet-point summary in sight.
Not long after that, though, something clicked. My brain got into the rhythm of the denser text at more or less the same time as I worked out who all the characters were (it helped to have seen Clueless several times), and suddenly I was … enjoying Austen. The chapter openings are consistently great, the asides are savage, and the social critiques are delivered in a flurry of bon mots. There’s a bit where a character goes to London for a haircut and everyone else is so bracingly mean about it, I laughed out loud in a cafe.
After that, I was off to the races. I started reading every night, tucking myself under a blanket on the sofa to chug through as many pages as I could before the embrace of nature’s soft nurse (Shakespeare’s words, not mine) caught up with me. Eventually, I started leaving my laptop and phone upstairs, far from where I might be tempted to grab them, and going straight from one classic to the next. Turns out almost all of them are as good as you’ve heard – rather than being a boring chore to read, they are fizzing with good ideas and beautiful phrasing. Apologies to every single person I’ve ever had a conversation about literature with, and also my mum.
And reader, it worked. These days, when a friend WhatsApps me to talk about the latest X beef or infuriating pile-on, there’s roughly a 70% chance that I’ll have no idea what they are talking about. If I get anxious after 10pm, it’s about the injustices of the Victorian-era class system (thanks very much, Wilkie Collins), rather than the collapse of democracy or microplastics in my water bottle. I still find time to be upset about that stuff during the rest of the day – I’m only human – but for a blissful hour or so before bed, I get thoroughly lost in the cares of someone who lived a century or more ago.
I still haven’t read any Russians yet, obviously. I’m saving them until my PlayStation breaks.
