Restarting My Relationship with Reading
Like many other people who spend way too much time on their phones, I have been struggling with a lowered reading tolerance ever since graduating from college probably. Like many other adults who worry about what their lack of finished books means about them, I was a voracious reader as a kid and teen, probably bolstered by the now foreign concept of no social media other than like Neopets.
Over the years, reading for pleasure had taken a back seat to doing readings for my college courses, then grad school courses, then for the high schoolers I was teaching. After spending the whole day running around like a chicken with their head cut off (#TeacherLife), taking BART or the bus back home from work, doing chores at home, cooking, grading, prepping lesson plans, etc, etc the last thing my brain wanted was to read a novel a few hundred pages long, especially when Netflix and YouTube existed. However, after leaving teaching a few years ago, I realized that I just didn't have the attention span anymore or even interest in reading books and I didn't even have the "excuse" of being too tired from an office job. The only things I could reliably read were articles on my phone, personal essays no longer than a Substack newsletter or Medium piece, manga and graphic novels, and web comics.
The whole debate about "Do graphic novels count as literature?" was the central guiding question for my introductory unit for classes who had been assigned to read graphic novels like Persepolis or American Born Chinese as their summer reading. As a huge enthusiast for graphic novels and comics, I do firmly believe that they are literature. They are absolutely an art form and there are stories, feelings, and ideas that are best expressed as or could only even work as a comic. It is a really amazing medium to me, combining the written word with visual language and expression in a way that just feels so Right to my brain. It's also been quite amazing to see the evolution and explosion of popularity that graphic novels have experienced over the years as well and they have firmly entered the mainstream under a plethora of different genres. I think they are a wonderful tool for struggling readers in school who may be reading under grade level or otherwise have no interest in reading. Better to read manga than nothing at all at the very least.
However, they cannot totally replace reading completely text based works. While reading graphic novels does help promote literacy and teaches other forms of literacy as well, it truly is not the same as regularly reading full length novels. Don't get me wrong, it is absolutely valuable to build a kind of vocabulary for visual based expression, such as body language and facial expressions of the characters, color scheme and more abstract uses of art to convey mood and emotion and theme, sequential art based narratives and storytelling, amongst other visual signifiers.
It does not lend to increasing overall reading tolerance for novels unfortunately and reading full length novels engages other parts of the brain as well that go otherwise un-engaged in today's world of shorter and shorter articles and videos. Reading longer stories forces us to slow down and think about the meaning and significance and implications of the words in front of us in a different way from taking in a piece of visual based art. It also helps us to work our imaginations and visualizing skills as graphic novels have their own distinct style and interpretations of the stories and characters as expressed through the specific artwork they use for each panel and scene. However, text only stories leave the specific images open for interpretation to the reader, forcing the reader to connect the dots and fill in the blanks more. These features of reading text based stories helps us to improve our reading tolerance and overall attention span in a different way than graphic novels.
Finding my way back to reading full length novels has been very nonlinear and something I have been incredibly embarrassed about upon reflection, especially as a former English teacher. The first summer of the pandemic I read as many graphic novels as I could from my local library, starting with the YA section's LGBT offerings (guilty pleasure since I never grew up with this amount of representation and it is of high interest which makes for easier reading) and moved on to the adult section's in addition to the online manga scanlations that I had never stopped reading. Even the difference between graphic novels and manga scanlations (scanned pages of original manga that fans replace the Japanese text with their own English translations) was huge. Graphic novels have the benefit of being planned and plotted out in advance, allowing many of them to explore deeper themes, have more complex characterizations, and experiment with structure more without sacrificing overall cohesion. They also usually go through edits as a whole work before it is published. Oftentimes, graphic novels are done by just one person doing both art and the writing.
On the other hand, many manga series are released on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, making it extremely deadline driven. There are some amazingly executed manga where the art and writing are phenomenal and you can tell that there was a lot of effort put into planning out the entire story but that usually requires a genius level mangaka or they are given a lot of time and leeway by their publisher, both of which are quite rare. Many mangaka are focused on meeting their deadlines and thus aren't afforded much time to plan much out beyond the current and immediately upcoming chapters. This kind of release schedule usually results in incohesive stories or character arcs as they prioritize what will engage readers on a weekly basis and it leads to incredibly unhealthy working conditions and the mangaka oftentimes end up burning out or developing health problems.
If they experiment too much, they risk alienating readers and much of what happens in the story is influenced by publishers or what is popular with readers since the story is being read in installments before it is completed (and they risk losing their spot in these weekly or monthly publications if they are not popular enough). Going back and being able to revise earlier chapters is not a privilege usually granted to mangaka.
On top of that, as an English reader, the author's writing is translated either by a group of amateur but passionate fans or a professional translator which usually takes some years to release. In both cases, especially with scanlations that prioritize quick releases to pull in readers rather than accuracy, many nuances get lost in translation, with many scanlations becoming meme worthy material with awkward or just plain incorrect translations that confuse more than clarify the artwork or author's intentions.
It is little wonder then why manga tends to be easier to read as it is designed to be as engaging as possible for each chapter to get readers to keep picking it up on a regular basis. Making a series that engaging while simultaneously balancing it with thoughtful character arcs, making sure the story doesn't devolve into over the top operatics or deux ex machinas, and working towards a satisfying narrative ending rather than becoming a neverending, repetitive series for financial stability is an impossible amount of effort for a mangaka operating on such brutal, serialized deadlines.
When you really think about it, it is an insane model and is oftentimes exploitative. On one hand, it makes me think of what kinds of work we would see if these creators were given much more time and resources to devote to their stories in a sustainable fashion. On the otherhand, it is this model that has produced an enormous amount of different manga series, some of it the most bizarre, wonderful, creative, engaging kinds of stories I have ever read that have gone on to be adapted into anime series, influence other creatives, and become a worldwide phenomenon.
In any case, the manga industry (and even webcomic industry) is overdue for some reform, especially in the wake of the burnount, declining health, and even death of some of the biggest names in manga. It is clearly a medium and artform that speaks to so many different readers and fans across so many different countries. There has to be a healthier way to go about producing these works without doggedly adhering to the unforgiving, unyielding rhythms of the attention economy.
I definitely didn't mean to go into a huge aside about the manga industry but I think it just shows how closely linked my and many other readers' weakened reading tolerances are to ~the attention economy~ and the proliferation of shorter and shorter articles and the overwhelming preference for video formats being pushed at every level. Reading graphic novels and manga is indeed better than just reading truncated social media posts or whatever and it did help to have a hobby that wasn't just staring at yet another webpage, but reading all the graphic novels in the world did little to help me focus enough to read a full length book.
The best way to be able to read a full length book is...to practice reading full length books. There really is no substitute. It is a longer type of task than we are used to which means it is not a short term, high dopamine kind of task. We get longer bouts of satisfaction from longer bouts of reading, but if our brains are used to the immediate gratification that comes from sensory pleasing stimuli like colors, images, and sound or from short term task completion or achievement pleasure like gaming or reading lots of little articles about high interest topics, then staring at one blank page out of hundreds with nothing but a bunch of boring looking words on it sounds like pure torture!
One of the best decisions I made during the whole pandemic was taking some online classes through my local community college. I was definitely Not Doing Well Mentally during that time but I'm still so happy that I took them. Aside from the obvious benefits like regularly talking to others through our discussion posts and having structure through classes, the creative writing classes I took assigned a ton of reading. I took a class on graphic novels which led me to finally read the highly praised Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud as well as some other great graphic novels, a class on cult cinema which got me to watch a bunch of movies I never would've watched otherwise and, even more importantly, to read an entire textbook for the first time in years. I learned a lot and I still frequently think about the concepts I read from that textbook. If only I could go back in time to undergrad and force younger me to read more of their textbooks... Anyways.
I also took a children and YA literature class which finally got me to read a full length fiction book. Yes, they were for teenagers but I figured I needed to start somewhere. It was better and more encouraging than trying and failing to read a bunch of non-YA fiction books from my endlessly growing piles over and over again. It gave me a sense of accomplishment for doing something over a protracted amount of time instead of associating reading books with failure or only associating accomplishment with immediate gratification tasks. It functioned as a buildable foundation to basically scaffold myself into reading more difficult books which in the process strengthened my reading tolerance. Hey, if teaching concepts work on children, they certainly can work for any kind of learner, including me.
The next semester I took some creative writing classes and thankfully we read a ton of short stories over the weeks in that course. It had been ages since I had read some short stories and my professor had assigned a very wide range of them. It made sense since the bulk of what we wrote were short stories in that class. It gave me such a greater appreciation for short stories, both writing them so regularly and reading so many well crafted ones too. They were short enough that I didn't really have to read them out loud to sustain my attention and simply enough, they were fun! It was fun reading short stories, both professionally published ones and ones written by my classmates.
I do love a full length novel but these classes really unlocked my love for the short story. It also helped me question what my brain "counted" as "real reading." Short stories may be similar in length to many articles I read on my phone, but some authors take years working on and revising just one short story, such as my beloved Ted Chiang. They are thought provoking and can stick with me as much as a full length novel. In fact, the length of the short story is many times its greatest strength, forcing the author to come up with powerful, memorable images that can make lasting impressions on a reader under such limiting constraints. "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin are visceral commentaries on our society that stick with me more than many TV shows, all without needing a single image to communicate truths about human nature we are more than familiar with.
After taking those classes, I decided to finally try to read a longer, more complicated piece of fiction and settled on Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, the beloved lesbian necromancers in space story which was decidedly more complex than the more straightforward YA stories I had been reading. Embarrassing to admit but I needed to read so much of it out loud to keep my attention on the story. Once I got over that initial shame of having to read out loud in my late 20s, I found that it was actually a super effective strategy to keep my mind focused! It also helped my comprehension of the story (The Locked Tomb series is not a super easy to understand story for many different reasons), probably because I was attending to the story through visual scanning of the text, processing it to read out loud, processing it to underline and annotate the text, and receiving auditory input like an audio book, just less passive and more active. (I feel so validated for making my classes read things out loud now.)
I did the same with Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, reading it out loud this time for both myself and my husband. Then again with Parable of the Talents and then Dawn. I didn't realize it at the time but that is when I fell in love with speculative fiction (I mean, Octavia Butler is one hell of a writer. It's hard to not fall in love with reading her work). Each book helped me boost my reading tolerance just a bit more and honestly made me a more thoughtful person, not just someone consumed with thoughts all the time. With more practice, I was able to read the entire Baru Cormorant series which are some of the longest and best books I have ever read in my life. And I didn't even need to read them out loud!
Like a lot of other people, I'm tired of the endless sea of immediate gratification clicks and dopamine posts. I realized that I started this journey because I wanted to feel like I could pay attention to what someone else had to say at length about something they felt was important. Not just what made them emotionally reactive, not just a collection of hot takes on whatever was in the zeitgeist that afternoon. I wanted to hear a story that was so important to them that they thought and planned and wrote and revised and edited and revised and thought and thought and thought over and over again for years, an excruciating process that holds no reward other than the promise of a story that conveys what is so important to them. I wanted to read and relate to it, not just react or passively intake it.
Depression in a lot of ways makes you selfish, a word I use not as a judgment but as an observation. You oftentimes cannot see or think beyond yourself when you are mired in depression because you just don't have the capacity to since so much of your energy is just focused on surviving and tolerating. I think after struggling with depression for years and years, I wanted to finally be able to pay attention to someone and something other than me and my thoughts and my feelings. I wanted to understand someone and something else and not just their stated arguments or opinions or be convinced to feel or think a certain way. Rather, I wanted to buy in to a world and story that they created and to take it seriously. I wanted to see and appreciate their worldbuilding, their laws of their reality, their structure, their themes, their characters. I wanted to be present for all of it.
As cheesy as it is, I think reading fiction is transformative in so many ways and speculative fiction especially. I was not prepared for how oddly and wonderfully hopeful spec fic would be. Being depressed made me so stuck in my own head and wanting to not exist that appreciating spec fic with its focus on the future and its possibilities felt like a Big Deal. Like, maybe there is a future that I can envision and there is a place for me there. It didn't feel like the escapism of doomscrolling or disappearing into other people.
It is no coincidence that the more I have read these past couple of years, the more sociable and more present I have been to the people in my life. When I read books and stories and am receptive to them, I am more thoughtful. When I don't, I am less so because I am less receptive to others' thoughtful ideas. I'm more likely just getting caught up in the emotionally reactive currents of the attention economy and enjoying the immediately gratifying feeling of superiority, leaving no room for anything or anyone else, only the feeling that This is the Only Way. Instead of broadening horizons, reading in this manner narrows everything in on myself.
After all, reading in itself is not an inherently morally good act if that makes any sense. It is tempting to think that reading in general is good for you. In a lot of ways it can be, but just like any other action, it can be used in maladaptive ways. The difference lies in how you curate your experience and what your goals and intentions are. It is so easy to lose yourself mindlessly reading other people's thoughts and opinions. Like that famous Twitter post says, we were not designed to know so many different people's thoughts and opinions, especially people we will never meet.
It's great to understand other people's points of view and expose ourselves to different backgrounds, but this is more like exposing ourselves to people's kneejerk reactions constantly over pretty pointless stuff. It doesn't help us to learn more about ourselves or others because that would require some level of vulnerability; instead, it just pisses people off enough to argue online and come away with a pretty misanthropic view on others. I mean, doomscrolling is a form of reading after all. It is easy to read an article about the latest meaningless online discourse and feel morally superior to others instead of actually living your own life.
Of course, some balance is good. The reason those kinds of articles about online microcommunity discourse are popular after all is because they help us feel like we are in touch with other people, that we are up to date and know what is going on in our spaces, even digital ones. In some aspects, it helps us to relate with others and can help us think about ourselves, like where we stand on these issues. But when the only thing your attention span can handle is this kind of reading and nothing else, it can definitely become a problem. For the longest time, the only kind of reading I could do were these kind of hot take articles and that didn't sit right with me, mostly because my only takeaways from these pieces were "obviously I agree," "obviously I disagree," or "this whole thing is dumb," all of which don't make for very interesting discussion.
I still do read and enjoy those kinds of articles just because they can be fun and interesting to see what kinds of issues and behaviors we humans come up with! They're like anthropological and sociological research and case studies in a sense. But now I also know that I like science fiction and fantasy and I want to do something with that knowledge, to learn more about something and try stuff that I hadn't tried before. Going back to short stories, I realized I hadn't ever read an author's collection of their short stories until I watched Pantheon and read Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie that it was based on. And then I realized I hadn't ever read a novella before so I read Martha Wells' All Systems Red. And just like that, I discovered how much I had been missing out on by avoiding and dismissing sci-fi as a genre (like wow, there are a lot of authors of color! And female authors! And queer authors! Sometimes all three!). All this time I had been categorizing it as being too dry or boring or beyond my understanding.
Beyond my understanding. How much do we as adults miss out on because we are scared to engage with something and find it to be beyond our understanding. And that when we do realize that we are lost or are not getting it, we just give up instead of trying to delve deeper or learn more or be curious about this unknown, strange thing in front of us. I think many humans, myself included, are naturally averse to feeling dumb or left out and much prefer to feel like we are with the in group, that we are better or smarter and we tend to seek out media and activities that confirm that. I've given up on so many books and hobbies because I felt like they were too beyond me.
And all of this posturing is because of shame! So much of my journey with reading involves shame. Shame that I needed to read books out loud to myself to get through them. Shame that I needed to read YA novels as an adult or graphic novels because a full length book was too much for me. Shame that fantasy instead of realistic fiction was my favorite genre and shame that I wasn't reading the important, morally imperative books that I "should" be reading. Shame that I didn't "get" sci fi. Shame that I gave up on something or shame that I missed out on a lot by dismissing sci fi and stayed in my comfort zone. God, how boring of a struggle this is! It always comes back to shame and I'm so tired of it.
And yet looking back on what I've written, it's crazy that I felt shame over all of those strategies and tools because...they worked! Reading out loud, starting small, not overdoing things, forgiving myself for liking what I like, not caring about what I "should" be reading, eventually giving something a chance...it all worked! I'm reading so much more than I ever have in my adult life. I'm reading widely and diversely. I've learned what I like to read and what I can read to grow as a reader and to keep wanting to read, rather than being motivated by the ~urgency of the moral imperative~ or to appear to be a ~mature adult~. I still read manga and webcomics and fluff articles, but I also read full length fiction novels across different genres, short story collections, one shots, novellas, nonfiction, personal essays, memoirs, experimental fiction, and poetry. And if I ever get bored of one format, I feel so lucky to have so many others to pick from to sustain my reading habit rather than angsting over why, why, why do I not want to read another full length novel, what does it meeeannn, what is wrong with me, while not reading. This is the power of intentional curation, baby.
Increasing my reading tolerance has been a strange, long road and it involves so much more than just reading more. Yes, practicing reading longer pieces of work was central, but so was confronting and investigating the weird feelings of shame that pop up at different points. There is a reason why many people (like me) lose their desire to read when they are depressed. As readers, there is so much baggage that is tied up with our relationship to books. As much as many people in the field love to opine about the decline of reading in the younger generations, I get it now.
As English teachers, it is so easy to get frustrated with students who didn't do the reading or who cut our class and no other classes or who complain about why they have to read entire books and why can't they just read articles or excerpts. Our schooling system throws old, dry books at our students who live in a dopamine entrenched world and then the system throws over thirty students per class at the teachers and expect them to get students to learn how to love to read and appreciate literature. The problem really isn't the books themselves a lot of the times. A great teacher can teach a book and make it interesting. It's hard though when you have such a huge caseload of students and so many lessons in one day and so many different needs to meet all at once and a schedule to adhere to.
Students struggle through these books, feel stupid when they don't "get it," are too scared to ask for help, and then they become closed off when they are asked by their teacher to try to be vulnerable and relate to it. They are ashamed that their reading pace is so slow compared to their classmates that they cannot keep up with the reading assignments so why try. They are ashamed that their ADHD or other learning disability makes it so hard for them to focus on the work even when they want to and end up failing pointless reading quizzes so why bother showing up to class. Some are ashamed that they are straight up illiterate (yes, fully illiterate) and that the only way they hope to graduate is by their friends letting them cheat off of their work. It really isn't a wonder why many of them just say that they "hate reading" in order to fend off any other inquiries as to why they don't like the books.
It's actually really sad if you think about it. When I was teaching, I didn't really see any of this since my immediate reality is that I need to get through my unit with these students and they were making things hard. But now? I guess I consider it a great thing that some of them still at least read manga and comics for fun. I can count the number of students on one hand who actually read for pleasure during the school year. I don't really have a good way to conclude this other than I hope that some of them rediscover reading books for pleasure at some point in their lives. At the very least, I hope they learn to not only associate books with pain and dread.
It's kind of crazy that I needed to stop teaching reading and books in order to learn how to enjoy reading and books again and how much I needed to trick my brain into forming new neural pathways. It's also mind blowing how much reading is so much more than just reading. It comes with a lot of baggage and with that baggage, shame. Sometimes in order to learn how to read again, you have to put aside the urgency and the clout chasing and the desire for relevance and the moralizing and just learn how to have fun with a good story again. Read out loud if you have to. Read something wildly out of your comfort zone and maybe you'll discover something you love. Or read within your comfort zone and have fun anyways! Just don't only doomscroll.