Drinking killed reading for me. I had to resurrect it.
What I’m reading and intend to read soon
When I drank, I drank a lot. I drank until my life got smaller. Drinking reduced my capacity to do and enjoy many things. Reading was a chore, made more difficult by my muddled brain struggling to make sense of the words, or how the sentences formed a paragraph, or how the paragraphs formed a concept, or how the concepts formed a chapter. Books were never finished.
Reading was something that used to bring me joy and escape. I started reading very young. I began by reading for the pleasure of the neurons snapping together. It was several years before I truly read for meaning and not just for the thrill of deciphering the puzzles of letters and punctuation. But when that pleasure began, I couldn’t stop it. I would read the days away, the sunlight beaming through my windows and accompanying the shouts of my friends outside, begging me to come outside. “Da-a-vid, come out and play” was the song. Eventually my mom might come into my room and remind me that friends were outside, waiting for me to join them in an adventure in the neighborhood. Bikes, explorations of the woods behind our house, rearranging the pile of bricks in our backyard to recreate favorite scenes in adventure movies.
I spent my nights under a blanket with a flashlight, devouring whatever books I had. The library was a sacred place and my mom brought me there so much that I ran out of books in the children’s section and had to “graduate” early to the older books. (As a teen I got a job as a page in the library, reshelving the returned and errantly-placed books–it was the best job I ever had.)
Drinking removed reading as a pleasure. I pretended to still be a reader and would muddle through a book on vacation, or deep in my brain fog on my morning subway commute, but you know that thing where you have to restart a paragraph several times because you can’t focus? Yeah, that. Conversations with friends and acquaintances about these books proved that I didn’t remember much from them. I’ve talked with many people about the phenomenon of buying a book and putting it on the shelf and somehow equating that with having read the book, and this was definitely the height of that scheme for me.
For a time, I gravitated toward books about drinking. I hesitate to mention it because it was so bad for me, but I sought out books by authors who had drunk themselves to death, books like Under the Volcano, a semi-autobiographical novel by Malcolm Lowry that is so breathtakingly depressing that one would think it would scare a drinker straight - but I obliterated myself with tequila during the time I was reading it, just like the protagonist. If you’re triggered by stories of people drinking, please don’t read that book. (Paradoxically, there’s a bar of the same name in Manhattan, and yes I spent some after-work time there when my office was down the street from it.) I will not read books like that now. It’s a guardrail.
I tried to read books recommended for work, or to keep up on current thinking in my field, but at best I could take away a couple of key concepts. That’s actually good enough for most “business” books, which is why there’s an entire industry of distilling unnecessarily long books into a few paragraphs. I should have stuck with reading the latter, but as I was lying to myself about how bad my drinking was, I had to soldier through regardless of my ability to actually process the material.
Around the time I quit drinking, I was at a party and a friend was talking about a book she was reading. I said, out loud, “I used to read.” She looked at me funny and asked “why don’t you read anymore?” I replied that I thought it was because I had lost the habit when I was commuting by bike (a subway commute builds in a chunk of reading time), but I realized that it was because I had drunk it out of myself. It made me really sad and I changed the subject.
Sober, I read with genuine pleasure again. Let me make that clear: I regained a pleasure, a joy practice that I lost when I was drinking so much.
I make space on my calendar for reading, as the pressures of work, parenting, and everything else in adult life can threaten that time. I make the time, clear-headed, again a sponge for the wonders that books bring. I also abandon books that don’t bring me that pleasure and move on to the next one(s) in the pile, something I would never do before.
I am a sober reader and it brings me joy.
I love you,
David
