Reading Should Not Be Rushed, Especially When We’re Reading Stories We Care About
stories that move us, stories that make us wish time would stop still.
“People who read because they’re required to read, people who spend so much time scrolling on their phones, rarely, if ever, understand why people who read slowly do so deliberately, intentionally.”
In my neighborhood, in the long green area, separated by a narrow road, I take a walk with a friend a few days a week, in late afternoons. When we walk on this road, my friend’s six-year-old son walks between us, holding both our hands, until he sees a flower. Then he drops our hands, runs to the flower, kneels, his hand reaching for the flower. The look on his face, pure joy. While we stand behind him, wishing he stands soon so we can get on with our walking, he stares at the flower as if he has all the time in the world. Then he closes his eyes, leans in, nose to the petal, as if he is smelling a flower for the first time. When he stands, we start walking again, my friend’s son between us, until he sees another flower and he drops our hands. He does this every time he sees another flower.
Once, I asked him, “Why do you always do that? Stop and smell every flower?”
“Because I hear them whispering to me.”
“What?”
“If I pass a flower without smelling it, I hear a whisper. What about me?”
There’s this thing I do before I start reading a book or submissions from writers, even if I have a class after thirty minutes, even if I have only twenty minutes to read. I look away from the book or my laptop just for a moment, look through my window—I see white clouds moving on the sky, I see a tall tree sticking out of my neighbor’s house. And I tell myself, “I’m going to read another story now.” And then I turn my head and start reading.
Once, I was sitting in a cafeteria with a writer friend who reviews a local magazine. We were in an airport terminal, waiting for a mutual friend to arrive. We had a few minutes to kill. Before I opened the story I was going to read, I did my thing—I looked across the tarmac, at the windows reaching the ceiling, at Ethiopians carrying large suitcases and hurrying toward wherever they were going away or returning. And then I turned my head and opened the story I was reading.
“What was that?” my friend asked.
“What?”
“That thing you did with your eyes.”
“My eyes?” I was confused.
“You seemed to be staring at something but at the same time you seemed to be somewhere else.”
I started this ritual—which friends tell me is odd, weird even—when I realized I didn’t like jumping from reading one story to another story, as a way of slowing down. I’m a fast reader, but when I started reading submissions for Narratively, I didn’t like that I read submissions fast. In high school, I read Fikir Eske Mekabir, an Amharic classic literature, and How to Kill a Mockingbird, an American classic story, in Amharic and English classes. I was chosen to read because I read fast. I can still read fast but I don’t like doing it anymore.
These moments—right here, me holding a book, or right about to start reading another story on the screen—I savor them just as much as I savor reading. They remind me of my friend’s son on that road, right before he puts his nose on a petal of a flower, to smell a flower as if he’s smelling a flower for the first time.
Recently I read Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life.
“How much better and wiser it would be, how much more instructive and enriching, if we proceeded at a snail’s pace! What matter if it took a year, instead of a few days, to finish the book?”
Miller took a year!—to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He called reading the book—spending time with the novel, “as with a living person,… I might even say.” I’ve never done this, spend a whole year with one book.
A few weeks ago, I saw one of my students sitting on a chair in a cafeteria, in the institute I work for, her eyes on her phone. I had something to talk to her, so I went to her and touched her shoulder. When she looked up, her frustration for being interrupted came off her face like smoke. A few days later, the same student came to my office. I was sitting on my chair, my back to her. “Sorry for interrupting …” she began, and when I turned, “oh, you’re just reading.”
Just reading.
The next day I asked her what she thought I was doing before I turned and she saw that I was reading a book.
“I thought you were using your phone,” she said.
It bothered me that she thought reading is just reading, that she thought it is okay to interrupt me because I was just reading.
No, I’m not just reading. I’m reading slowly, I’m savoring every moment, I wanted to say but I didn’t say anything. People who read because they’re required to read, people who spend so much time scrolling on their phones, rarely, if ever, understand why people who read slowly do so deliberately, intentionally.
Reading should not be rushed, especially when we’re reading stories we care about, stories that move us, stories that make us wish time would stop still. So I pretend. Even though I have many tasks every day—I teach, I write, I have in-person and online meetings—when I sit to read, whether I have thirty minutes to read or three hours, I pretend I have all the time in the world—so I could read this story, at this moment, so I could pay attention to small things I might have missed if I read the story fast—like the way a writer describes the feather of a dead warbler in a short phrase.
When you read slowly, you are right there in the story with the people you’re reading about. You can see them, hear them, feel them. You’re not rushing to get out of the room, to see what else the people in the room are going to do. When you rush, you might miss that person, sitting on the floor, next to a dead plant, his hands cradling the pot the plant was sitting on.
I don’t read slowly everything I read. Emails, company reports, team meeting reports, research materials, I read them fast. I don’t remember a time when someone told me I looked happy when I was reading an email or a team meeting report unlike those times people told me, “you look happy ,” when I was reading a short story collection or a novel. This is how I want to read stories I care about, short stories, novels, essays, submissions from writers, slowly, savoring each story I’m reading. This means that I need to choose the stories I’m going to read, but for those stories I choose to read, I’m not rushing through them to get to the next story. And I won’t hear them whispering to me, what about me?
The flower that my friend’s son smells might be the 1000th flower he is smelling but he smells it as if the flower he’s smelling is his first flower. That’s how I want to read stories I care about, stories that move me, stories that make me wish time would stop moving, as if that story, which might be my 1000 story I am reading, is my first read.
This is beautiful and exactly what I needed to hear today. Many people need to hear this. Thank you.
delightful
you are my designated reading pro or
my inspiring cheerreader