The pleasures of distraction

It’s been a little quiet on the blog over the last month as various planets of distraction move into alignment.

To start with I’ve been lucky enough to score a gig over at milkbarmag.com writing the monthly literature events round-up. The mag is still in its infancy, and it’s great to be on board to help it bloom.

Second, I’ve hooked up with a talented and enthusiastic bunch of collaborators on a new video project. Watch this space for more news later in the year.

More recently Skyrim entered my life and promptly knocked me senseless with a dwarven staff of obsession. For the last two weeks I’ve been hiking icy mountain paths in search of equal parts night thistle, skeever tail and troll fat – no stone left unturned.

I’m fairly sure that the thin line between fantasy and reality will soon unspool, but until that happens, Skyrim and I are kindling a fine, and unexpected, romance.

I recently read Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, which I’d recommend to anyone reaching a kind of impasse in their reading habits (as I was).

Jacobs prescribes a kind of antidote to the many ‘must read before you die’ lists that seem to dominate the online literature space, asking very little commitment of the reader, just to ‘read at Whim’.

Whilst immensely rewarding, the ‘always-on’ connected world catapults our sense of self into a chaotic universe of opinion, where, as Jacobs writes, readers can begin to “wonder whether they are reading well, with focus and attentiveness, with discretion and discernment.” Jacobs quotes from a reader’s letter sent to him:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Jacobs’ take on reading is that it should, first and foremost, be enjoyable and suggests that enjoyment has been largely stripped out of readers in high school where students are first introduced to pre-selected readings ‘lists’, and the idea of books as ‘study’.

Whilst I don’t take all of Jacobs’ advice as gospel, the idea of reading on a whim certainly resonated with me.

Over the last five years I’ve found myself ploughing through reading list after reading list in a kind of vain attempt to soak up as much ‘literariness’ as possible as I forge my way as a writer. The unfortunate side effect of this is that I’ve come to think of reading as work first, and entertainment second.

When my will to write dulls, so does my reading habit. Lately, too many of the additions to my bookshelf have felt like battles rather than entertainment, and many of those battles I’d just as rather walk away from.

And so part of this distraction from writing is also a welcome distraction from the work of writing.

While I regather my creative wits, I’m attempting to re-engage with reading and discover some of the enjoyment I had when I was a bit younger, when I was perhaps less aware of where I sat in the reading schedule, and instead more open to just savouring the journey.

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