August 6, 2025

Look 118: Learning to read

Fellow angler,

I missed the last post date because I was traveling and I considered sending a post last week to make up for it, but do you ever get so lost in the sauce of general life tasks that you, without realizing it, miss out on some of the things that you keep in your life solely as a fun escape from the torrent of tasks? No, me neither.

Part 1: Where I know how to read

Let’s start by setting the record straight: I can read. I love to read. I’m the readingest damn thing you ever saw.

I am also obliged, as a wife guy, to mention a classic vine that I have mostly put out of mind but that my wife will never allow me to forget:

Part 2: Where I’m bad at reading

I don’t mean this in the sense of Lexile scores or however the current standardized tests decide kids can read as well as they should.¹ I can read well. Where I struggle is with close reading.

As with many things in life, I think my problem started in high school. At first, all was well. I read great books and had a good time. I still had my innocence. Then Goodreads entered my life along with the idea of reading as much as I could.²

Soon, I was burning through books in an attempt to inflate my (book) body count and also my page count (total pages read per month or year).

Me and the other nerdy kids in my high school honors program would gather in the hallways after Latin class to share book counts and to determine the pecking order within our loser society. It was serious business. If someone didn’t read as many pages as me, I would openly mock them. If someone did read more pages than me, I would run to the second-floor girls' lavatory to sob like Moaning Myrtle.³ Then I would push myself to get through even more books.

It was a dangerous time for high schoolers. Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard rumors that big page numbers were being pushed on young readers by the Sackler family.

In college, I continued to set personal bests. After college, I was working too much to read as many books, but that was when I discovered comic books and manga, which allowed me to reach new heights in pages read.

I was claiming to read books much like Tai Lopez, grifting in his garage, claimed that he could earn significant money, which he decided to call fuel units, simply through the knawledge he gained from reading one book per day.⁴

ANYWAY, the point of all this is that I got into a habit of reading for quantity and not for quality. I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was reading.

Part 3: Where I relearn to read

Reading books by other writers — both good and bad — is arguably the best tool for someone trying to improve as a writer. I believe that Stephen King — a man known for writing full novels faster than most people take to drink their morning coffee — has claimed something to that effect.

As I work more seriously to become a novelist, one effort I’ve made is to extract more value from what I read. My life has gotten busier. I don’t always have the time or energy to read as much as I’d like. So it’s important to make the most of the books I do read.

In practice, that has meant actively working to slow down my reading. I’ve noticed that if I slow down from my usual reading pace, I understand and retain more. I notice more of the jokes and potential references. I pay more attention to the structure of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and overall plots.

I don’t remember everything I read, and I know there’s still plenty of nuance that I miss. But perfect recall isn’t necessary for me to gain something useful from a book. On the whole, I’ve been reading books more closely over the past year. It has noticeably helped me understand the way others approach the art (and science) of writing.

Title song

Today’s post is brought to you by that classic from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Learning to Fly.

I briefly considered a song from a band I like more: Learning to Fly by Pink Floyd. But I remember that as a half-decent song from an otherwise quarter-decent album that the band released during what was, for them, an eighth-decent decade at best. Now if you’ll allow me to conclude this math lesson, let’s return to the actual title song.

Petty’s Learning to Fly is an interesting song because it sounds so light and, for lack of better words in my vocabulary, bouncy. The acoustic guitar makes one feel happy. When most people listen to it, they feel happy. I think the consensus is that it’s a song about persevering or finding joy through challenge or some such nonsense.

I feel the need to correct the record here. While I understand why people have their encouraging interpretations of the song, the lyrics are, at best, ambiguous. That leaves room for me to have a less happy interpretation.

According to Petty, at least some of the lyrics are inspired by the Gulf War. “And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn,” were images he saw in TV coverage about the war. Meanwhile, “And the sun went down as I crossed the hill / And the town lit up, the world got still,” sure seems to evoke a bomb, nuclear or otherwise. The music video for the song also features war and bomb iconography.

The character in the song is talking about being alone, getting beaten down by life, and good old days that may not return. He’s making his way to “God knows where” on the assumption that he’ll figure it out when he gets there.

This is a broken man. He doesn’t know where he belongs in life or how to get somewhere he can feel better.

I give him credit for continuing on. Even if he doesn’t want to, I say that sometimes building the habit of continuing is the most important.

In conclusion, should you feel happy after listening to this song? I don’t know. I can’t remember the exact point I set out to make or why I decided it was so important to make about this song, but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that landing is often harder than flying.

Until next time,

Happy fishing!