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I'm impressed you were able to *really* read while working in the bookstore. I worked in one in high school too and we were allowed to read but I never found the reading I was doing was of any value and I certainly couldn't make headway on anything.

If I wanted to read, usually I picked up this collection of Anne Sexton poems because maybe I could get through one of those and SORT of absorb it.

She has these rewritings of fairy tales I found amusing. That's why I went with her.

My reading hack is: Always have a book going, even if you are barely actually reading it. Just always be able say, 'My book right now is X.'

Corollary: As soon as you finish one, select another. That is ALWAYS. Don't let a second pass when you don't know what your book of the moment is.

Repeat.

I don't think I get through as much as you, but I do OK!

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"I feel like there’s an unexploited market niche for a business that is structurally a hostess club but dressed up like a bookstore, where the girls wear cardigans & you buy them a cup of overpriced tea to hang out and flatter your literary taste."

are you familiar with Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa"? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1974/12/16/the-whore-of-mensa

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omg

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I don't know why I feel like I needed permission to be fickle and erratic with my reading (like, it's supposed to be for fun anyway?) but your advice has freed me from my subconscious completionism. And you're right, it was totally holding me back.

This was stellar. Many thanks!

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Thank you for this, it helps with understanding it’s about reading and how discipline can sometimes ruin the quality of a pleasurable reading experience, it’s important to take away what you need from books and let go when it’s no longer serving you. However it’s important to maintain the curiosity to indulge in something different because that also helps you to read more

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Thanks for writing what was largely in my mind already. More power to the substackers who keep elaborate notebooks and write endless essays about what they read. I don’t want to do that. (No need to humble-brag that they failed by ONLY reading 50 books last year though 🙄) If I am held up at gunpoint and can’t remember which Shakespeare play Ophilia was a character in, well I guess I’m toast. (But then again that’s a weird part of town I should avoid anyway!)

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This scene always stuck in my memory.

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"Most things in general are bad." is kind of an underrated/understated take both in the sense that it's easy to take too literally & just be a hater and in the sense that it's sometimes difficult to realize no it's not you that just isn't good.

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I love this post. Partially because of the reading tips, which I’ll play around with in the new year. I especially appreciated the nudge that “it’s ok to dislike something/ think it’s bad” – I have this tendency to be somewhat reverent towards books because I admire the effort required to produce anything book-shaped*. Maybe I need to give myself permission to be more irreverent. (Maybe I need to produce something book-shaped? I’ve had this thought for a while, to collate essays/fanfics/poems/short stories/… and have them printed just for me, to have something non-ephemereal to leave through, maybe 50 years from now even. Maybe that would be a beautiful thing to do at the end of each year?)

Anyhow, another reason I love this post is because of how you described the bookstore scenery. I’ve been reading your blog since the ladylike post, and somehow that’s now part of my context for your writing. Like it all suddenly became more visceral. (I just came across Sasha Chapin’s piece for how to enjoy things more, and he mentions the context of the artist as something that can increase perceived depth. I read your piece right after, maybe that’s why. Link - https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-to-like-everything-more)

Are you at all interested in what subjects people would be interested in your opinion on? (I can imagine reasons why someone might want to actively avoid it…) I’d be very curious about a similar post on “how to write more” :) (Totally unselfish suggestion haha.) Also about poetry!!! How do you read it/more of it? How do you go about writing it? Like, actual word-by-word process. Sometimes I’ve noticed journal entries becoming poem-like, and experimented with “leaning into it” and revising the beginning later. I’ve also tried brainstorming imagery/phrases/rhymes with the thought that I’ll revise later, and I feel like that process might be really nice if I could get it to work, but so far it remains stuck in the “messy collection of words” stage.

(I'm a bit conscious right now of how I'm not really replying to your post, more like taking it as an excuse to ramble at you. Please take it as such.)

*(Exception: books that feel copy-written because someone decided they need to enhance their persona by having written a book, or whatever. Also sometimes things that feel “stretched” because of incentives to inflate one’s apparent output or ???. Self help and some scientific papers are genres I associate particularly with this. But maybe I’m particularly disdainful of that because playing those games successfully seems even farther away for me than actually writing a book. (I’ve done neither.) Mhhhh…)

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great post, feels like breaking down how Tyler reads 7 books in a day (or however many he reads)

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Working circulation desk at a huge library was my peak reading experience. Anything we checked in that looked interesting, I checked out. Nowadays I am a huge Libby fan!

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