Learning to love reading again

Well, hi there.

2021 is off to such a great start, isn’t it?

Sigh.

Before I forget: Today is my father’s birthday. A couple of years ago, I changed how I spent my parents’ birthdays. Instead of just shipping them a card and a gift, and giving them a phone call, I began driving to their town, picking one of them up, and taking them out for a meal. Quality time, plus a quality steak, or whatever they were feeling up for. For the last couple of years, I’ve looked forward to this each January and October. 2020 threw a wrench into this new routine, and 2021 looks uninterested in fishing the wrench out. So I sent a gift, and I’ll call my dad a little later today, and we’ll both be bummed that’s all we get. Happy birthday, Dad! I miss you.

What I’m reading

Last year, I noticed something weird about my reading habits. More and more frequently, I found myself abandoning books. Usually I don’t mind doing this; as I mentioned in a previous letter, I’m often able to tell if a book isn’t for me, or if it isn’t for me right now. If the latter, I’ll put the book aside, and try it again later. But in 2020, something was different. Books that were obviously exactly right for me were annoying me, or losing me, or disappointing me. I finally hit a streak: I abandoned five books in a row.

Well. That’s not the books.

That’s me.

I figured I could try two things: Quit reading for a little while — give myself a break. Or find a book that required absolutely nothing of me, and let it ease me back into what it feels like to want to read again.

I couldn’t imagine not reading, even when reading is this difficult. Reading is one of those bedrock parts of my every day. I read over breakfast; I read before I go to sleep. So I tore through my bookshelves, looking for that one elusive book.

And…I found it!

The book that unstuck me was The Impossible Fortress, by Jason Rekulak. It’s a fast, lighthearted novel — precisely what I needed — about a boy writing a computer game in the 1980s. At its best moments, it reminded me a lot of some of my favorite novels about computers and workplaces, like Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland, or You, by Austin Grossman, or Version Control, by Dexter Palmer.

Anyway: I finished Fortress in a day, and voila, I’m back.

When I read a book I like, it often leads me to the next book I should read (often regardless of what I’d planned to read). In this case, since Fortress reminded me of those computer/workplace-type novels, I went looking for some modern workplace fiction. Sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to remember it, is a book I impulse-bought at Powell’s before the pandemic stowed us all away at home: Severance, by Ling Ma. I’m just a couple of chapters in, by already I’m anxious to get back to it. It’s like Then We Came to the End via Station Eleven: A workplace novel set against the backdrop of the apocalypse. (This one looks like it involves a pandemic, btw, so if that feels a little too close to home for you, put it a little further down on your reading list.)

What I’ve been watching

I’m a couple of seasons into a full rewatch of The Americans at the moment, and boy, do I ever love this show. If you haven’t seen it before, the premise is simple: Philip and Elizabeth are married. They own a travel agency. They have a little house in Virginia, and two kind children. They’re also very deep-cover Russian agents. Their new neighbor is an FBI counterintelligence agent. And it’s the early 1980s, in the thick of the Cold War. There’s plenty of real good spy shit in this show — some of it the best real good spy shit you can find anywhere — but the real reason to watch, for me, is the story of a fake marriage that has to appear real for everyone else, including the children of that union, while the two people in it are just…coworkers. Who sometimes might be in love with each other, and sometimes might want to kill one another.

I also watched Tenet recently. Or…I think I did. Or maybe I will. If I did watch it, I’m certain I had an opinion. Do I know my opinion yet? Some version of me probably does.

Some things that made me think

Israel is on pace to vaccinate 50% of its population (nearly 9 million people) by the end of March. At peak, they’ll vaccinate 2% of the population per day — that’s nearly 200,000 people. (via Kottke) By contrast, my state, which has less than half the population of Israel, has vaccinated fewer than 100,000 (“Why Oregon still can’t say when you’ll get the COVID-19 vaccine,” OPB).

Another thing that makes me hopeful: I left Facebook and Twitter a couple of years ago. This year I pulled the plug on Instagram. I am re-learning how to spend my time and energy on things that I can enjoy in the moment, and not process for a perceived audience. Not everyone has the same experience when they leave social media, I know, but for me, stepping away has restored some of my interior life, and made me remember what it means to be present from one moment to another. I often catch myself wondering, now, why I ever thought anybody was interested in the minutiae of my very ordinary life. It’s nice to keep it to myself…

[…he typed, as he wrote an insufferable newsletter about the minutiae of his very ordinary life.]

Something hopeful about writing

I’m easing back into a new project. For months now it’s been difficult to give my brain space to rest or think. I am still not sure if I’m successful at either. But I’m putting myself back to work regardless. I’m filling a notebook with revisions and new scenes. Last year, I joined Nina LaCour’s Slow Novel Lab, and came away hopeful about my project, and embracing the challenges it represents. Taking it slowly, though.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about putting time into something you care about. Allowing yourself to be a beginner; knowing it’s okay that you’ll suck at the start, that your ambition might exceed your ability for years. But so desiring to improve that ability that you give yourself to it. I enjoy listening to podcasts, and so often, a person’s first podcast is a mess of technical failures in the beginning. But you can track their expanding skill set as the podcast ages, as the audio wrinkles smooth out. You can literally hear their passion for their newfound craft as the material they produce sounds better and better. (It’s been shared a million times by now, but if you haven’t heard Ira Glass talk about the creative process, I highly recommend spending a few minutes on it. And then returning to it once or twice a year for a long time.)

Writing’s a lot like that for me. I was trying to remember when writing first felt important to me. I remember writing stories as a child — derivative knockoffs of things I was reading at the time, the Hardy Boys or what-not — and illustrating them, too. I can remember writing to my audience in the fourth or fifth grade, when my stories had to involve bodily functions that would make my classmates laugh uproariously when I read them aloud. I remember in middle school, trying to write short thriller stories like the novels I was reading at the time. And of course I mostly remember my very special teacher, senior year, who gave me exactly the nudge I didn’t know I needed. I wrote so many pieces of fiction that year.

I was eighteen, I think, when I started writing the first practice novel. Of course, I didn’t know it was a practice novel when I wrote it. It was something great, I just knew it was. But it’s in a drawer — a file, rather — and has been for a long time. In fact, this year, it’ll be twenty-five years since that first practice novel. The next two books I wrote were practice, too; again, I didn’t know that then. And Eleanor was the book that came after, and boy, did my ambition exceed my ability then. We all know how long that one took.

Being good at something you love is an ever-changing, forever unfinishable journey. I learned things from Eleanor that helped me write Awake in the World. But Awake in the World showed me fifty things I didn’t know I wasn’t good enough at yet. My current young adult project has been, surprisingly, one of the most challenging things I’ve worked on. I’m not good enough yet. I’ve learned a fraction of what’s available to learn. I keep revising what I think I know. I’m learning not to speak with certainty about writing, except to be certain that I don’t know anything about it at all.

And that’s what makes me hopeful. Excited, too. That I’ll get to spend whatever time I have left continuing to learn, and trying to get better. I love to write stories. By the end of 2021, I’ll know a few more things about how to do that. (And have discovered a few dozen things of which I’m just not capable. Yet.)

What I’m most excited about? The thing I’m writing now has footnotes. Footnotes! Footnotes are so goddamned cool.

I wish you a creative 2021, despite all the anti-creative forces at work in the world right now. I hope you make things that make you happy. I hope you keep them to yourself, or share them if sharing them matters to you. Whatever you make, I hope your reach always exceeds your grasp. That’s what keeps you on that journey to get better.

‘Til the next insufferable newsletter,

Jg

About the author

Jason Gurley is the author of Awake in the World, Eleanor, and other books. He lives and writes on a hill in Scappoose, Oregon. More at www.jasongurley.com.

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