How to Read More Books

Some people here on Substack have been asking this question in various threads that I’d been seeing. I am not going to write a full answer, and most of what I know about this topic I learned from other people!

But I will write a very subjective partial answer today because I am thinking about it. I am thinking about it because I have a beautiful hardcover copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski next to me that I bought a while ago and am not reading, even after making the explicit commitment to read it.

It is known as a hard book. It is nonetheless a hard book that I can still read, page-by-page. At 736 pages, if I read 10 pages a day, I would be done in a little over two months. I am still not doing this.

I am not doing this because I have some prerequisites for reading it in order to enjoy it. If you have a hard book to read, but there are other books that are prerequisites for it, you end up reading more books while in the headspace of the first book, and you enjoy the goal-book more.

I had read Moby Dick as preparation for House of Leaves. Moby Dick is known in English circles as the first modern novel. House of Leaves is known in English circles as a very good example of a postmodern novel.

So there is a potential prerequisite there. I would read a 700-age modern novel before a very long postmodern novel.

The prerequisites can be highly personalized and arbitrary. If you are familiar with postmodern novels or horror novels already because they are your jam, or if something just pulls you towards House of Leaves and you just got way into it, you might not have any prerequisites. You know there aren’t because you are just reading the book and it feels good to you to be reading it, such that you just keep reading it.

If you think that a book might be good and you might really enjoy it, but you aren’t really getting into it yet, that is when you might have some prerequisites.

After reading Moby Dick, I cracked open House of Leaves and read 20 pages of it, and realized that it is a really cool book, like, really cool, but that it was going to not be as emotionally satisfying to me as it should be.

I wanted to read the sequel to Jennifer Egen’s A Visit From the Goon Squad called The Candy House. Two years ago I couldn’t sleep one night and bought the kindle version to just read on my phone until I fell asleep. It had made an impression in my brain, and I wanted to finish it, in part because I had no idea it was a sequel to A Visit From the Goon Squad and it was really cool to see the characters again and their enmeshed lives. I remembered this feeling of want.

I couldn’t explain why I wanted to read The Candy House first. That explanation was not as straightforward as reading a Great “Modern” book before reading a Great “Postmodern book.” It took me some time to figure out why I felt a pull towards it.

Danielewski is obviously a genius of some sort and does a very interesting thing around playing with Grand Concepts of Meaning in his work. He plays with Form while maintaining the Meaning and Structure of the Form, while trying to take it to the edge. Kind of like pushing the limits of a formal villanelle, really stretching its poetic structure, while still having it technically speaking be a villanelle, but one layer up. He does this with the concept of a novel, and how references to What is Happening still Technically Make Sense and relate to each other correctly and logically.

I have not read the book. The above might not be right. Please correct me.

I think I was drawn to Jennifer Egen again because getting a taste of Danielwski’s genius made me notice what I felt myself missing — which was, a lot of emotions for their own sake.

Jennifer Egen is also a genius, and her books are also very complicated. And she also plays with structure. But what she holds “firm” and what she holds “loose” as priorities are different. I’d say that the way that Danielewski maintains integrity around Meaning in certain big ways, Egen maintains a lot of integrity around the “moments of intersection” or the “moment of intersubjectivites coming together” or just “reunions over time.” She introduces these characters and their inner lives, and then their lives are entwined with each other — and then she maintains a lot of integrity around trying to make as realistic as possible what everybody is feeling when they see each other again after a bunch of stuff has happened.

It’s gossipy. But it’s gossipy in a brilliant way that makes you smarter reading it, because it doesn’t just create a bunch of gossip and then disperse it, leaving everyone to fend for themselves after all their adventures. After the adventures, everybody still knows about the adventures having happened and still has memories of the experiences with other people, and she tries really hard to stay faithful to this, and stay with the question of “what happened next” after the major scene has happened.

I think I wanted to really be saturated with this, so that when I read Danielewski I don’t miss it. I wanted to feel certain things first so that later I could feel other things and be feeling good about it.

With nonfiction, you might need to know something first, before knowing something more will transform you in the right ways. Fiction can be like that too — you might want a certain transformation, before a different transformation can happen.

And it builds. If you’ve seen Basic Instinct, you might know that it makes a lot more sense as a film if you’ve seen the catalog of Paul Verhoeven’s other work. Both the jokes inside the film and the film as a joke make a lot more sense.

I used to go to the library and take out a lot of books — whatever caught my attention, and just start reading them. Most of them would not be good books, and I would skim them, or get to the good parts. Some of them would probably be good books, but I would not be getting into them for one reason or another. These are the books that I would just keep and accumulate late charges for because I would want them around, but would not actually fully read them.

And then in that pile of books, there would always be 3-5 books (in a pile of 20) that would be really easy to read, and that would not be easy because I am actually skimming them. They would just be easy for me, and I would not be skipping any parts of them. They just speak to what I am thinking about and interested in at the time, that reading them does not feel like a chore at all.

This is the feeling you want to build a muscle around noticing. When you have this feeling a lot, you know what reading feeling “easy” is like, as a familiar texture. You know when something feels hard, but interesting and aspirational — when it feels challenging in a good way. You notice when something is too out of your range currently. You also start to notice your own interests around how and when you might like to stretch yourself.

When you have this set of feelings well developed, “which books to buy” starts to feel easier too. You start finding books that are more uncommon, that won’t be in the library, that you’d never skimmed or read and so you don’t know if it’ll be good, but for some reason you have a good feeling about it. Going to bookstores is good for this reason too — you find books that you wouldn’t find in a library and you get to flip through them and see what feelings you get about it.