175. A promise to myself
On reading and my gratitude for the library, however I choose to access it.
In which Rebecca tries another way to borrow books.
Dear Reader,
For years I didn’t read. Well, sure I did, but not books. In fact, for a very long time all of my reading activity had been in a rapid thumb-swiping format on a gadget in which I could see my reflection.
Interactive reading on my smartphone or tablet – short- and super-shortform style – was the only way in which I was consuming the written word. I didn’t use my devices for reading books, though, but news articles, opinion pieces and – horror of horrors – the endless scroll of posts served up in my social media feeds.
Feeds? FEEDS? Was I feeding on this stuff? Well, yes – and to the point of gluttony.
🎁 A present to myself
On Christmas Eve in 2019 I made the deliberately unspecific promise to ‘read every day’. I didn’t want to make it a chore: I could choose to read just a page, or even only a paragraph. A whole chapter wasn’t compulsory, and – you’ll be surprised at this, Reader, knowing my love for keeping track of things – I had neither word count nor checklist.
I quickly became accustomed to having a book on my bedside table again, and it felt great when a single volume became two, then more. It had been my intention to have just one book on the go at a time, but curiosity would inevitably get the better of me and I’d reach for my ‘next-to-read’ just as readily as the book I had already started, dipping in and out of both according to my mood.
📚 The ‘rules’ of reading
I don’t know when I’d first identified become aware of entirely imagined the rule of only reading one book at a time, but I was excited that my rejuvenated reading habit gave me no such restrictions. And once I’d ploughed through a couple of what I’m calling ‘trial by volume’ books, I realised that no rules exist for finishing a book, either. Turns out that picking up a book and beginning to read it doesn’t need to be a to-the-bitter-end commitment. I feel I gave Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient a fair third-time-lucky crack, but gosh, having been unable to engage with either characters or locations I returned it to the shelf with most of its pages untouched.
Did I feel guilty? Not a bit of it. Heck, this was literary liberation! I can read what I want to, and not read what I don’t. Ha!
👉 Choosing what to read
My magpie brain collects reading recommendations to stash like treasured trinkets and bring out periodically to admire. I guard them jealously among all of the other shiny entries on my life-list of want-tos.
I pick up ideas for what I’d like to read from all kinds of sources. I talk about what I’m reading – and what they’re reading – to family and friends, and fellow Substackers too are a fabulous source of recommendations. I read the culture and review sections of my weekly newspaper, and am often tempted to seek out a particular book by what a reviewer has had to say about it.
So far, so fantastic, but Reader, there’s a downside. In my five years of renewed reading the list of books I’d like to read has grown to a length which neither my bookshelves nor my budget have the capacity to accommodate.
Hang on, though. What about the library?
📗 Shelves of memories
As a very small child I loved the library and its tiny moulded red plastic chairs. I’d flip the large, brightly-coloured shiny books displayed standing up in deep wooden boxes, their hardback covers slapping against each other as on every visit I tried to find one I hadn’t yet read.
I loved the technology of the library, too. I didn’t have a hope of understanding it, but I knew that if we took our weekly allocation of four books to the friendly, fluffy-haired lady at the counter with enormous glasses, she would pick up her shiny-tipped metal ‘pen’ attached to a thick black flex which led to goodness knows where behind the scenes, and run it across both my library card and the shiny barcode-printed sticker inside each book.
A piece of paper with columns was affixed inside the front cover of every volume, and the fluffy-haired lady would mark the due date of the book’s return with a rubber stamp which was cleverly attached halfway up the electric pen.
Scan.
Beep.
Print.
I was impressed with not just the pen but also the rubber stamp. I had a thing for rubber stamps, and loved visiting both the library and the post office: two places where important things were made even more so by the careful stamping of an official mark.
Over time, the library’s contents outgrew their space, and the building became a community daycare centre. The new one, not all that far away, doesn’t look any bigger, but once you’re inside it’s rather like a rabbit warren, with unexpected openings and corridors leading from one room to the next, into an area of the building which can’t be seen from the street.
When I boomeranged back to live at home for a spell in my twenties I joined the library again. Records of my previous membership had been archived, and I had to sign up all over again. Then, soon after I married ten years ago and threw myself into a delightful flurry of changing official documents to show my shiny new name, the library was an early port of call, and one which I began to visit regularly.
But time passes. Life gets in the way. I got into the habit of buying, not borrowing.
👩💻 Turning to technology
I haven’t visited the library in person for a very long time, but as a writer whose consumption of the written word has been growing at the same rate as my passion for writing I’ve recently found myself back at another of its doors: an invisible one.
I’d been hearing about the Libby app from a variety of sources, and a few weeks ago I decided to take a look. I was surprised that I even knew where to find my library card, given the amount of time which had elapsed since I’d last borrowed a book, but there it was, and I entered my membership number and PIN into the app. Wow, this was easier than I thought!
I spent some time exploring the virtual shelves. Having always resisted the temptation to try an e-reader I had feared that I wouldn’t get along with reading books on my phone screen. ‘It’s going to feel really odd!’ I told myself.
Really, Rebecca? With your former habit of endlessly scrolling social media on your phone1 and your penchant for consuming online news every time you’re waiting for the kettle to boil2 for a cuppa?
Do me a favour.
🙄
❤️ Dear Reader, I love it!
I’ve trimmed the level of short-form reading I do on my computer screen – yes, my Substack inbox has suffered – in order to conserve my frustratingly limited energy. Instead – thanks to Libby – I have been taking great pleasure in using my phone to read and listen to both familiar and new-to-me books from a diverse variety of longform writers.
As well as listening to five – FIVE! – lengthy Agatha Christie audiobooks, in the last few weeks I have also enjoyed three e-books:
Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney – a gripping psychological thriller with a huge twist which I didn’t see coming;
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen – a dark comedy about two friends involved in dubious enterprise;
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder – a highlight from my childhood.
My favourite so far, though, has been the 11-hour audiobook of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, read by Anne Reid, which has in turn prompted me to get hold of the out-of-print – and unavailable from the library – Five Hundred Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington secondhand. I love travel tales like these; stories of journeys – and not just physical – undertaken by ordinary-yet-extraordinary people, and Five Hundred Mile Walkies is now on my bedside table alongside Neither Here Nor There, one of Bill Bryson’s European travel memoirs.
Not every item I’ve borrowed has hit the mark. The characters of a Scandithriller audiobook left me as cold as the Norwegian snow through which they were struggling, and my attempt to listen to a disappointingly-narrated Christie story I know very well was inevitably short-lived. I managed just over five hours of a predicted ten-hour listen of a psychological thriller before it took an upsetting turn towards a topic that I will always choose to avoid, and three more e-books I tried – by authors both classic and contemporary – didn’t hold my attention at all.
Point to ponder #1: Is it too much to have several books on the go at a time?
No! With my Libby habit I’m happily stopping and starting, passing from screen text to audio and back again in a spontaneous switchback of loops and slides, and this excites me no end.
Point to ponder #2: Am I being too hasty in deciding whether to stop reading – or listening – only partway through?
No! I would often make impulsive decisions about book purchases both in high street bookshops and online, and if my relationships with them didn’t get off the ground both my budget and my bookcase would be compromised. Yet on Libby – and indeed at any bricks-and-mortar library – disappointments can be dealt with very easily. If I don’t like a book I can simply return it early. No hard feelings, and no punch to the pocket.
📒 Ripping up the rule book
I am loving my new rules for reading. You see, there aren’t any. I can consume as many books as I like at a time, putting one down and picking up another in a neverending tasting menu of stories to enjoy. And no longer do I feel committed to finishing reading a disappointing book simply because I’ve started it.
Because life’s not like that – and neither is the library.
Love,
Rebecca
📚 Reading 📚
📚 I enjoyed what
of had to say about reading, libraries, and her work as a librarian, in this post. Check it out!
📚
of used her local public library earlier this year for something other than reading!
📚 And here’s a lovely vignette of a post by
about taking a book back to the wrong library:
📚 Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will be no strangers to my ongoing light-hearted correspondence with fellow Brit
of . It’s his turn to reply to me next Wednesday!If you’ve enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you.
And thank you for reading! If you enjoy ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’, please share and subscribe for free.
Before I waved goodbye to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram many years ago.
About 400 times a day (this might be a slight exaggeration, but still).
"The characters of a Scandithriller audiobook left me as cold as the Norwegian snow through which they were tediously struggling." Beautiful writing. Thanks for mentioning my post.
Libby is awesome - I think I found it in the early pandemic days, and it changed my phone usage from feeding on feeds (I love that observation! So APT.)
Adding “Counterfeit” to my list. 😃
I just got a book delivered yesterday in app, but after a few pages, I realized no one was making me continue and promptly hit the “Return Early” button 😤
I log my reads on StoryGraph; I used to use GoodReads but this one has charts and stats, which lets me nerd out exquisitely 🤓