Text (Reader+Author)=Meaning

 

The image above is from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), a little free library find that may be my favorite read of the summer.  I finished it this morning, at one point standing in the living room because I couldn't bear to put it down as I went to close the window, and then was so transfixed by the words that I stood in the middle of a dark room, reading.  

Its structure is soooo rewarding: there is a narrative arc of sorts, but then surprises and reprises.  I read too fast, wanting the next bon bon of surprise and delight.  It's personal, academic, accessible, and political.  It reminds me that I want to change the image that represents me on social media to a water bottle filled with rice and baby formula.  The image above refers to a theme in the text about livers, but I like how the alimentary tract here terminates with an intestinal USA, a full one.  (I am not sure what to make of the placement of Hawaii.)

The passage above the image includes these lines about a dialogue between author and editor: 

"I understand that what she wants is an explanation of the mysterious connections that exist between an author and her text.  If I am present in the subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves?  Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gear shift to get from one sentence to the next?  Should I say we?" (Rankine 54).

Rankine's musings hit on a couple of issues I am thinking about currently:

1) First person narration.  I am writing a thing that is fiction, but in a confessional first person ("Curses: My Year of Internet Dating").  It does concern me that readers will think the "I" is me when really I do want something more widely applicable.  I am trying to write a "we," an everyperson kind of scenario.  It is inevitable that folks will think this is about me (and worse, if they are someone I have gone on a date with, about them).  

2) "We" is about the narrative voice (the weaving together of author and subject and fiction and known truth, the embodied and the imaginary).  BUT "we" is also about how the text and its reader create meaning.

Yesterday I wrote this in my journal: 

"Good literary analysis teaches you about yourself, your world, and the people you know.  

It is 'creative' in that it is generative.  

The text is what it is (50% of meaning) and how its reader meets it (the other 50%)"

(My journal: August 7, 2025)

I think a lot about how reading is actually a compact between the text and its reader.  I think I disagree with the new critics that texts have a pure intrinsic meaning, one that is objective.  But I don't think I am exactly advocating Reader Response Criticism either.  I'm probably closer to RR but feel like something in that model isn't quite right.  It implies a lack of rigor maybe?  I'm not sure.  I need to unpick my biases and learn more about RR first.

Anyway: leaving other thinkers aside, I think texts have meaning because of how readers interact with them *and that readers should be allowed freedom in their interactions, and not be shoehorned into checklists demanding they identify certain codified and approved "important" textual elements.*

After reading Rankine though, and in spite of wanting the "I" in my own writing not to be collapsed with me, I think there is also some residue of the author that we have to contend with, like it or not.  

For years, I have believed Roland Barthes that the author is dead.

But now maybe I wish the author wasn't?  Maybe I wish that the text had certain intrinsic characteristics, but also that a murky web of connections reveals things about the author and their world, and that to arrive at any meaning at all in reading fiction in particular, a reader HAS TO bring their own murky webs, connections, experiences and insights, their memories  and imaginations, into play.

Trivia: memory and imagination happen in the same part of the brain.  The Hippocampus. 

No not this kind of hippocampus.

Perhaps it is all part of my freak out about AI and its effect on the Humanities, reading and writing in particular? 

Maybe it is just me being defensive?  

I insist on putting all the humans back into the equation.  For now, at any rate, when it feels like AI is the final precipice off which "English" or "Literary Studies" will fall, and conclusively perish?

But humans will still live, right?

And humans will still want to feel themselves seen and understood by other humans?  They will still want to connect, and share powerful emotions?

Because that is what makes life worth living as a human, right?

So, I end with math:  Text (Reader+Author)= Meaning 

and maybe "meaning" here really means connection.

On the Importance of Intermittence in Cognitive Processes (I owe you a meaningful post about the summer reading experiment)

 

Well, reader, I feel like I owe you something closer to insight, or fact, or revelation.  

I went on vacation!  It was nice.  I stayed at a place that looked out over a small lake.  There was a verandah with a little wicker couch facing the water.  I made a wee reading nook there.  It was the bomb.  So good.  I read most of Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings on that wicker. I left my phone and iPad in my room (upstairs, far away, no distractions), and I would read, sip tea, read, look out at the lake, read, adjust my position on the couch etc.. 

Planning this post, I initially thought that what I had learned was that reading with a view helps.  I tested the theory at home this morning by reading on my front porch (Jodi Picoult's House Rules, a book I picked up at the lake place when, after I had already packed my mostly finished Kwan novel, there was a delay and I needed something to read in my nook and it was in the cabin's "grab a book if you need" basket).  

At home on my porch (see photo above): yes the view helped, it was nice.  Something about bare feet and wind helps too, as I have remarked in a previous post.  I have a colleague who often slips her shoes off while reading or thinking hard, I've noticed.  Is there something to this?  Has a neurologist/ cognitive scientist ever studied feet as they relate to thought processes?  

Really though, my observation is about cognitive processes being somehow intermittent.

This last month has been a struggle with my computer and my wifi.  I learned through that struggle how much my ideal writing process is intermittent.  Technically, I can blog, or work on my other creative writing offline.  However, I realize I have a dependence on keeping silly, meaningless tabs open and flipping to them periodically.

I like writing for a bit, and then flipping to another tab and [reading a horoscope, looking at Facebook, glancing at McSweeney's or The Onion].  Productive writing happens in bursts, with short periods in which my brain needs a rest and so I look at something else passively.  It's not multitasking.  I am not productive on anything other than writing.  What I flip to in other tabs is fluff: nothing that truly engages me.  I can't watch FB videos: they suck me in too much.  Instagram likewise, I get pulled into something too long.  The news, likewise: too strong an emotional tangent.  Email--don't go there; it requires focus.  

So, I write for [I'd guess 5-10 minutes--I haven't precisely timed it, and it varies I think based on how difficult the writing task is: harder would be shorter] and then I read my horoscope. And then I come back.  It's like my brain just needs a minute.  It's resting, yes, but I think it is also still working somewhere back there.  It's still kind of on task with the writing, but needs a moment to let that work happen in the background somewhere (in the cool, shadowy, deep of head, murk of not really conscious thinking from whence truly good ideas actually come) before I press back to typing (which is sharp and shiny work somehow, and feels very frontal, piercing, hot, all eyeballs and forehead).

Reading is not exactly the same as writing. I don't feel reading as all eyeballs and sharp.  It's not as intense and front of the head and bright as writing is.  Maybe it feels like it's in the middle of my head (which tracks with what I know about parts of the brain involved in reading fiction).  HOWEVER, it is the same in that I need to come in and out of a tight focus.  I read for a while, and then I need to look at the plants and green things.  I read for a while, and then I lift my gaze and I sort of look at my surroundings, but lightly.  I am not looking around intently, not trying to see or hear or feel my surroundings.  I am just taking a moment to pause from the stimulus the book is creating and to process.  My eyes may be looking at purple coneflowers, or a lake, or someone at a nearby table eating a croissant, and I may very lightly be engaging with those things, but the depth of my engagement in those fallow moments is still with what I am reading.

I may have looked up for a few minutes, but during that looking up my brain is still working on, working out, thinking of, reflecting on, absorbing, processing, the thing I have read.  This moment might look, from the outside, like distraction, but I don't believe it actually is.  

I think intellectual process is a wavy line: one swerves in and out of tight focus on task, and needs the swerve away into a "resting" moment.  The swerve away is as important as the tight focus.  They balance each other.  I'm "on" and then "rest" and then "on and then "rest"--THAT is how the reading or writing moves forward.

As for the wind and one's toes: not sure yet how that figures in but wouldn't it be a fun surprise if it turns out there is something important there, neurologically?  Readers with fMRI facilities, can you please check into this possible connection, stat?

Commitment Issues

 It is possible for me to have more than one book on the go, especially during semester (bedtime fun book, multiple things being read for work).  It's easiest if they are very different genres and time periods so they don't start to meld in my head.

However, my current situation is unsettled, ridiculous.

I started  Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.  43 pages in, I am wondering if this is simply not the right time for this?  Too male maybe?  Or lacking interiority?  Or I just can't seem to latch on to the narrator and be interested?

I read half of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let me be Lonely yesterday, some of it while standing in front of the little free library in which I found it.  Rankine quotes Cesaire, Coetzee!  She's so good.  Why did I not know this before?  I am saving the other half.

At bedtime, not wanting Seven Moons, I tried Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Dude!  I'm sure the David Copperfield feel is intentional, but even so.  It's too Dickens/Austen and not enough ZS.  Likely I need to give it more than 4 pages to be fair, but it was not love at first page, which surprised me.  I generally love ZS).

Then (still at bedtime) I read a few pages of Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things. 

It was promising, so why, when I got up this morning, did I start Cynthia Green's blue feet monsoon over breakfast?  It is full of references to Singapore in the 1980s (totally my jam).  Who else remembers Paya Labar airport (precursor to fabulous new Changi)?  Whoo!  I do I do.

Efforts to get this laptop to connect to home wifi for more than 90 seconds are now in the "f*ck around with DNS" stage, which is REALLY advanced for me.  Please send help.

Feet out the Window

 This afternoon, reading with a headache, I was inside in my reading chair set-up with as few lights on as possible.  It was okay.  I was relatively comfortable.  The headache did not have me in bed.  I was able to focus just fine.  I read for about an hour . . .

But honestly, I enjoyed my reading more yesterday morning when I was waiting for my teenager and parked on the far edge of a school's parking lot so I could be in the only tree's deep pool of shade.  I rolled all the windows down.  It wasn't too hot (only about 80F), and there was a light breeze.  I hiked my skirt up and took my sandals off.  I put my right foot out the car window, and my left foot on the dashboard.  I could feel the breeze on my toes.  I read happily for about 45 minutes.

On headaches: 

I get migraines.  They are not as bad as they were two years ago when I was getting 17 a month of which 3 or 4 confined me to bed for the day.  I am very glad they are not so bad, but they still slow my life right down, which is hard for me.  I'm a doer.  I'm not necessarily productive, but busy-ness is definitely my go-to coping strategy.  

To not do.  To sit.  To wait, To let things get better with time.  To just be in one spot, and feel the various discomforts, and wait them out . . . is very very hard.  

It's also good for me.  In that messed up way one can have gratitude for lousy experiences, I am grateful that migraines remind me that sometimes if you are still things do just come and you see them, experience them (e.g. the young sparrows on the windowsill, wings aflutter, still demanding their parents feed them, or e.g. my own teenagers who might share an extra word or two with me if I am sitting still on the couch).

Also, I am reminded that any day I am not in bed is a good day.  Doesn't matter what else does or doesn't happen.  Am I out of bed?  Yes?  HUGE WIN!

On the book I just finished, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood:  

Ooo.  This is understatedly interesting.  It is a kind of secular soul searching.  Instead of gospels we get a snippet of Joan Baez ("Action is the antidote to despair") and of Hippocrates ("First, do no harm") (26).

There's a moment to which I relate profoundly in which the narrator, retreating from trying to engage with the world's problems and solve them, unsubscribes from 25+ newsletters: Threatened Species Rescue Center, Human Rights Watch, Aboriginal Legal Service, Greenpeace, Green Living Australia and more (152).

There's this gem of an observation: "I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life.  But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after.  Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there" (210).  

This one helps me understand what sometimes feels like frustrating "stuckness" in a dear friend whose wife died suddenly of a brain aneurysm five years ago.

And finally, I hope this is true of me in this moment:

"A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time.  Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting.  Something is getting ready to resolve itself" (254).

Kapoor wrap up

 I am trying to learn from Kapoor's Age of Vice.

I am trying not to be annoyed by the last 130-150 pages, and am trying to remember that this may just not have been the right time for this book for me.

I am trying not to feel like the author's self-indulgence has robbed me of time.

It's not a bad novel.  There are some lovely moments of insight.  It does a nice job of tackling a problem using multiple intersecting perspectives.

Kapoor could maybe have prioritized certain plot elements and characters, and eliminated others in order to crystallize and sharpen the whole (this is a lesson I can learn: I have a baggy, problematic, self-indulgent manuscript that needs to be turned into something better).

Kapoor and I could both do with editing more like the imagist poets did: what is the thing?  Find it, describe it, cut out all the connective tissue so that you can really see it.

Pivoting to the positive: should I read something fluffy next (Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings), or a Nigerian political novel (Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things),  or an Australian novel about a woman's moral/mortal crises (Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional)?

I'm leaning towards Charlotte Wood, perhaps because it will offer a single narrator rather than the complexities offered in the Kapoor work.  Also because it offers Australia (a change of scenery given that I have just been "in" India).

Did I mention I have a lovely new laptop from work that absolutely will not get along with my wifi at home though it works fine at work or in a cafe?  If I restart everything, I get about 3 minutes of wifi use at home.  I have spent almost three weeks trying to solve this problem, with hours on the phone with various kinds of tech support.  Today's move will be asking the wifi provider for a new wifi gateway.  I have written this short post at home, and have been prompted by blogger several times that updates are "failed" because I am no longer connected to the internet . . . So, time to reboot folks.  See you on the other side.

But really the thing that feels good is LOSING time

 Re: the summer reading challenge thing, and time.

I was talking yesterday with a talented and insightful poet friend about time.  She has a great poem which I read as about how we perceive quantities of time as enough or too little.

It made me think about time's elasticity, and about something I once read about the uterus, or maybe actually it was about the vagina: pictured in textbooks as hollow, that space is not rigidly circumscribed (vagina like a hose, uterus like a melon), but is squishable, flexible, more like an uninflated balloon: there's only space in there if something makes the space, if something stretches the walls apart from each other.

What! You are thinking.  Why am I reading about the female reproductive system??

Gentle reader, sorry.  But isn't time uterine?  

It seems to be firmly circumscribed  (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds) but really its walls collapse and touch each other, or expand apart if something stretches them?

There's a lot more to be said about time.

In terms of the summer reading, I am now deep into Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice.  

A couple of days ago, I had my first experience in many years of taking welcome refuge in reading a novel.  I went to it to hide from other tasks, and I spent time there that felt restorative.  I lost time.  I did not count the minutes, or think about them.  I read until I felt recuperated enough to tackle other parts of my day.

Being released from the work clock, and from the clock of child care really helped.  I felt like I was in a warm honey flow of the day, not wearing a watch. 

What a relief.

The summer reading challenge is about focus, but describing it by rigid time and as an exercise in sustained concentration both also make it effortful. (Yes, sometimes effort is needed.  I am not necessarily opposed to effort.  However... ) 

My realization of the last few days in which I have been reading a lot, with pleasure, without pressure, and with a sense of imaginative dreaminess and physical restoration is that this state lets me escape time, and that feels great.  It feels like much sought ease.  It feels like luxury.

I don't want a Rolex, I want to feel like I have slipped time's noose.

Ideally, reading fiction gets me there.

Bookstores

     Perhaps you are too young to remember when bookstores were a more prevalent thing?  Barnes and Noble, Indigo, WHSmith, and Borders were all massive chain bookstores with cafes where one could buy a mediocre pressed sandwich of some kind and an overly milky espresso-style beverage.  

    Those who believed in independent bookstores thought the big chains would put the small places out of business, but ultimately Amazon put the big chains out of business and some of the hardy independent stores survived.  Thank goodness.

    The real threat is that people don't read.

    The other real threat is that we have found the pleasure of typing specific searches into computers and getting specific answers straight away.  There's a strong upside (if I want to replace my toilet tank, I don't want to browse information; I do want the most specific advice only).  The downside: you have to know what you are looking for. 

    What if you don't know what you are looking for?  What if you want to wander into a palace full of enticing options arrayed artfully, curated wittily?  

    What if you want to find a book you wouldn't have ever thought to ask for?  

    Then you need a good bookstore, one in which someone knows how to present books in manageable, interesting assortments so that you can browse pleasureably, without overwhelm.  It's an art, I think, putting good combinations of books into appealing displays.

    My home base bookstore in Baltimore (Bird in Hand in Charles Village), does a fairly good job of this.  So does Greedy Reads.

    Really superlatively good, however, is a bookstore in Harrisburg, PA called Midtown Scholar.  Midtown Scholar is huge.  It sells new and used books.  It is curated extraordinarily well.  At my recent visit, there was a large entry area ringed by "Famous Authors," and peppered with tables grouped in some predictable ways (“current bestsellers”), as well as some joyfully unpredictable ones ("for the revolution," "gothic horror and romance").  

    There's a whole room of children's books, a large wall upstairs of YA fiction.  Art, Art History, Literature, Literary Criticism, Philosophy  . . . it's a lot. It could be overwhelming.

    But it is so thoughtfully laid out: if you want to come in and buy an iced chai, a funny book about recipes based on The Hobbit, and a manga, you can do that easily in a comfortable browse, probably before your chai has even gotten drippy with condensation.

    I bought the following:

The Groff and Kwan were happy finds in a densely packed upstairs shelving area (fun for those who like a good hunt).  The others were eye candy in the artfully configured main room.  Smith in "Famous Authors," and Yuzuki in a "Featured Authors" display.

    Did I need more books?  Absolutely not.

    Did my soul need Midtown Scholar, as a balm in these trying times?  One thousand times, yes. Yes.

    Go check it out.  While you're in Harrisburg, visit the Pancake Row Houses in Shipoke.

Thirty Minutes with Deepti Kapoor

 Good Morning, y'all.  

I'm reading this big fat thing (a little free library find) because on the back jacket Rumaan Alam promises me it will be

 " a good, old-fashioned gangster story, impossible to put down.  It's a novel garlanded with Shakespearean flourishes--star-crossed lovers, secret identities, complicated conspiracies--exploring timeless questions of family, loyalty, and fate."  

As such it seems like a good pairing for the show I am currently bingeing on Netflix (Animal House).  I might as well say here that I have some concerns that Animal House, like a show my teen recently watched, AP Bio, might be fronting some "it's OK to be an awful white man doing criminal things" agenda. . . but that's beside the point of my post today.

I started reading at home, in the new reading set up, at 10.03 am.  I had a coffee (iced) with me.  

It took me a while to get back into who/what/where as I just started the book last night and the setting and characters haven't really taken hold yet. I was irritated by an image I found contradictory ("lava hours . . . air so cold it scars" 16), but didn't shut the book in a fit of pique.

I got distracted by wanting to move my side table so I could reach my coffee more easily, but then settled in relatively well, accessing some of the nuance Kapoor is slowly building (eg the enslaved protagonist is taught to mask his Dalit caste by saying he comes from a Kshatriya household).

The dogs barked, I read.

I thought about notes I need to make after a long and difficult meeting yesterday.

I hit a nicely focused zone (10.20ish)

The dogs barked.

I thought about when today I want to venture out in the heat and go to the gymn.

The dogs barked.

I got up and found two cookies to eat (chocolate chip)

I read and regretted the cookies.

I finished reading at 10.33 am.

I don't have a succinct reflection to tie this post up with, except to say I felt pretty focused, and read attentively and receptively, and yet: look at all those distractions!

Keeping it Real (and the future of reading)

 

Whelp, I am insistently un-intsagrammable, not AI, real: pictured is the new reading set up.  The chair and stool were bought at an estate sale about two years ago and have been resurrected from the basement.  The lamp/ table was a gift from a colleague when my apartment burned down in 2014. I believe it had belonged to his grandmother in Florida.  The vacuum indicates that I am blogging mid-housework.  There's an outlet with no cover (oh the glamor!).  On the couch in the background, a black dog and a white dog.  Oh, and on the wall the one thing I made in art class last summer which was accidentally good(ish): "Prison."

I write to you from the doldrums.  1) Only read the newspaper if you are strong enough of spirit to cope with your own powerlessness in the face of terrible things; 2) Only attend academic Board meetings if you are strong enough of spirit to cope with your own powerlessness in the face of terrible things.

Re: #2

I teach at a liberal arts college in the US.  I like it.  I teach in an English department.  I was chair for ten years and saw enrollments in my major decline, mirroring national trends.  Yesterday, at the meeting, there was more data about declining enrollments in the Humanities, and rising enrollments in STEM.  It's not a surprise, it's just a reminder.  It comes alongside the imperative "we need to teach students AI so they are job ready" and a recent article about an MIT study showing how much stupider we get when we use AI.

Guh.  It  all makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a pencil.

I asked one of the two teenagers I live with, one who goes to Hackathons and codes for fun, what would induce him to study a Humanities major:

Teen: "Well, I am torn between Computer Science and History, but I'll probably take Computer Science."

Me: [mouth agape] "History?  I never knew you liked it."

Teen: "Yeah, but I won't take it because Computer Science will be faster and I'll get a job."

Me: [thinking I have the solution, perhaps to all problems with Humanities enrollments in the whole wide world] "Would you double major?"

Teen: "No.  Those subjects are, like, opposites.  It would take extra courses."

Me: "What if it didn't and taking the double major meant you covered a lot of your general education requirements?"

Teen: "Still no.  I want to be able to focus the majority of my effort on my major."

He can be a bit of a semantic arse, my teen, but I love that he word played his way out of the conversation.

What is the solution though? Reading fiction is an excellent thing for the brain.

Perhaps the advent of AI will send people to an English major because they really don't want to lose their minds?

Guh.  I still have the "poke my eyes out with pencils, I can't stand it," feeling: I'd like an iron clad solution please, one that isn't rooted in my just being scared of losing my profession, one that shows a cost/ benefit ratio in which reading fiction in fact pays off.  

Please advise, gentle reader.

Ten Minutes of Reading

 Ok, so I timed myself and everything.

Today I have been reading at Vent, a lovely coffee shop, not at home.  Why?  Not sure.  Home has a good desk set up for laptop work (writing, the million emails, administrivia, teaching prep), but currently, honestly, not a good reading spot.  I mentioned the couch in my last post, but the couch is actually so well positioned for watching TV . . . 

I am going to steal an armchair out of my son's basement gaming room and make a reading nook somewhere on the main floor.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, here are my notes from the coffee shop.

    Ten minutes went by really fast.  I could read for longer, and I guess for work I often do. I have practice which gives me an unfair advantage (Are we competing, gentle reader?).  

     I was distracted by: the music (a cover of a song I almost but couldn't quite recognize), the man next to me (who drank two double espressos in quick succession, chased by a small glass of fizzy water and a phonecall in Russian), and wondering if the barista would give me more hot water for my tea (I waited and asked after reading).  Actually it's a bit hot in here too.

    Honestly it was all slightly uncomfortable.  Why am I not reading in libraries more often?  It's what they are for.  Reading.  In a quiet place.  This is obvious, but struck me like an epiphany: Oh right!  LIBRARIES.

    I accidentally started my reading of Reilly's Greta and Valdin at a place I had marked because I thought it was funny, not at the spot I had actually finished reading at last night:

        "I hope Freya doesn't say anything too weird to her."

       He shakes his head.  "I can't guarantee that.  My friend Ben came over a few months ago, and it really felt like she was implying that if he didn't want to be in a relationship with a horse, then he didn't really respect all living beings." 

  The fact that I started here meant the rest of my reading was re-reading pages I had already read at bedtime: an interesting experiment in itself.  Which is more distracting, fatigue or cafe-life mid afternoon? I noticed more things, and cross referenced the "Characters" page for clarification more often. I think my mid-afternoon brain is sharper, but that it is also less settled.  I think it's easier to write than to read at this time of day (this post is also being written at Vent).  I think if I read for longer I would be distracted more, but also, would read more deeply when I was reading . . . ?  A theory to test.

Aiming for 15-20 next time.  Meet you there, friend.

Summer Reading & Focus Challenge

 In a class I teach, I have students do "reading labs" in which they read fiction of their choosing and comment on the effect it has on them (any effect, emotional, physical, psychological etc.).

I want to pose myself a summer challenge that is kind of based on those labs.  I can read at bedtime for a few minutes but that is a sleep-aid type of reading.  I want to sit, with a book, during the daytime, and see how long I can read for.  

Problem: It is really hard to read without distractions.

Goal: Get better at focusing on reading.  I'm going to start with ten minutes*, and hope to build up, by the end of my summer (August 13) to sixty to ninety uninterrupted minutes.

And I will blog about my experience! (Among other things)

[*Ten minutes??! Is that all you are starting with?! 

Wait! you say, Aren't you a professor??  

Yes! I reply,  And even I fidget, procrastinate, scroll my ass off when I should be focused.  Welcome to the world of easy digital dopamine hits . . . that leave my life about as enriched as an all candy-floss diet would]

Unacceptable, disqualifying actions: 

Digital: checking email, responding to texts, doom-scrolling, reading my horoscope or social media.   I like a hard copy book partly because it is easier to step away from all the devices. I will use actual books for my challenge.  Bonus: no advertisements!!  No one is trying to sell me something while I am reading.

Physical: getting up to make tea, eating a snack, interacting with the pets (some of this is out of my control--the pets cannot be utterly silenced), using the bathroom, cleaning, doing yoga . . . really anything that is not reading.

Acceptable: 

Taking notes on the book, or on the experience of reading it (no devices for the notetaking--just pen and paper).

Pausing to think about the book.

Setting Matters:

I like to read at cafes, but there are lots of distractions.  I think this experiment will have to take place at home.

I like to read on the couch, with a cushion on my lap to hold the book up so it is closer to my face and I don't have to  hunch my neck over like a dowager.

If I had a hammock, I might read in a hammock.

Maybe I will sit on the floor sometimes. (Note--no moving  to a different setting mid-session)

A gigantic Lazy Boy would be perfect.  I had an immense one when I was an undergrad, and I did all my reading there.  I loved that thing.

What to read?

I'm going to read novels.  For me the exercise is about inhabiting a narrative, its world, and the perspectives it contains.  

It'd be different to read non-fiction items, but still a valid exercise if that is what you would like to do?

It is hard even for me to focus, and I know that ultimately I like to read.  If one were starting with a dislike of reading, this challenge would be hard.  Somewhere in the middle of that continuum is someone who liked reading when their age was in the single digits and is interested in trying to re-cultivate a liking for it.

Feel free to join me in this challenge and write me (I THINK you can add comments using the "comments" thingy below) to let me know how it goes?