Sometimes a book hits so right that you can actually feel your heart and mind expanding in real time.
I experienced that recently reading Dave Eggers’ excellent new novel Contrapposto. It’s the perfect narrative for this cultural moment, an intertwining tale of two lives spent embracing, exploring, and occasionally rejecting the art world.
My first read through was so fast and furious that I immediately went back to page one when I finished. When’s the last time you did that? It had been a while for me.
My excitement couldn’t be contained, so I texted a few old friends. One said he was looking for a new book and immediately downloaded Contrapposto. A couple said they’d add it to their library request lists (there’s apparently a long wait for this one in LA). I also brought it up at a World Cup BBQ and a few others said they’d check it out.
When I arrived at that small gathering I was handed Mo Daviau’s Every Anxious Wave, a belated birthday gift about a time-traveling bartender who sends people back to the past to see their favorite bands. My oldest daughter also gifted me a copy of Toni Morrison’s Jazz because she read it at school and thought I’d love it.
I’m very lucky to have people in my life who read, welcome recommendations, and still give books as gifts. It was a pretty amazing week for this omnivorous bibliophile.
My little bubble is happily bucking the trend, but there’s no doubt that reading is on the decline in the U.S.
A recent CBS/YouGov poll found that a third of Americans are “reading fewer books for personal enjoyment than they did 10 years ago.” More time spent watching movies/TV, gaming, or scrolling social media are the main culprits, but “doing more physical activities” also makes a strong showing.
We all have endless entertainment choices at our fingertips these days, and I’m certainly not going to fault anybody for getting up and moving their body around, but it does seem that modern reading demands intention—it’s something we have to make time for.
That requires understanding the benefits. Here is Kurt Vonnegut’s perspective on reading from an early ‘90s interview:
Reading is the only art that requires skill on the part of the audience as people have to read well. It’s almost like playing an instrument, only the instrument you’re playing is your mind…
Rose Horowitch’s recent Atlantic article, “The End of Reading Is Here,” cites a lot of additional research to reach the sobering conclusion that we already live in a post-literate reality with declines across age, gender, and education demographics. She describes reading as “a workout for the attention span” in this thoughtful, in-depth article that also stresses the value of reading:
The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging.
Books have always done that for me, so it’s hard to understand why anybody would consciously turn away from reading. Life’s about choices and I still believe spending time with books is important to prioritize. Maybe even more important than ever.
Reading, like learning an instrument or exercise, offers tremendous rewards, but they all require concerted effort. How do you get that across in a culture addicted to the dopamine hit of short-form videos without making it sound like “eat your vegetables”?
With glitchy short-form video featuring unfashionable geezers, of course!
Thankfully, the U.S. hasn’t totally abandoned books…yet.
The poll found that a third of Americans read around six books a year, including 12% that read 20+. My own book appetite has decreased slightly in the last couple of years (because reasons), but my annual count is still in the 25+ range.
I’m admittedly not much of a gamer, but I will occasionally tumble down that fidgety rabbit hole via some mindless app that I inevitably delete once I admit I’m hooked. Doom scrolling social media—whether spinning out about politics are checking in on my favorite basset hound influencers—is a much bigger problem for me day to day.
And I’ll absolutely binge a streaming series when the mood strikes (especially random BritBox mysteries; shout out Karen Pirie), but I try to keep it to a minimum. For me, watching a show is like eating a TV dinner while reading a book is like finding an interesting recipe and putting in the shopping time and prep effort to make it myself.
Despite the countless available distractions, almost every night ends with my Kindle. I used to read on an iPad, but the temptation to toggle over to Instagram or Notes often proved too hard to resist. The Paperwhite has a built in browser, but it’s just shitty enough to keep me reading instead. I’m only human, after all. (I do read the occasional paperback—like the gifts I received this week—but I went mostly digital years ago.)
I also fall asleep faster with the Kindle than the iPad, but that’s no guarantee I’ll stay asleep. When insomnia inevitably strikes throughout the work week, reading lures me back to dreamland for those crucial 45 pre-dawn minutes. I might be a zombie the next day, but my head is swimming with magical words and stories.
Like these lines from Contrapposto:
The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.
I’ve been an Eggers fan since reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in 2000.
I remember getting totally lost in his breakthrough memoir as my band Tsar embarked on our first tour of England that year—the four members, a small crew, and our gear stuffed into a cozy transit van. Books were a perfect way to escape the claustrophobia of so many (extremely hungover) dudes living on top of each other.
Picture painted fingernails gripping a Harry Potter book and you’ll get the idea. Punk’s not dead!
It was a liminal cultural moment when the internet was beginning to dominate, but a few crucial years before smartphone ubiquity. All four of us were avid readers so our rented vans felt like rolling book clubs as we traveled between venues around the UK and US. Some of the groups we toured with killed time playing video games—especially those with proper tour buses—but we all read a lot.
Those blurry memories came to mind as I devoured Contrapposto. Like the book’s two main characters, Cricket and Olympia, who choose the artist’s path early in life, the future members of Tsar first found each other worshipping at the altar of rock and roll during high school and college. Those personality collisions spawned various musical collaborations throughout the ‘90s until the four of us emerged as Tsar a decade later.
Intense shared experiences—including the many books we read together—keep us connected, however loosely, decades later. I could easily imagine finishing Contrapposto backstage before an early 2000s gig and immediately handing a dog-eared copy to any one of my bandmates. (Note: Tsar bassist Jeff Solomon is the one who immediately downloaded it on my recommendation. Rhythm section unite!)
In that way, books are a through line for me, connecting the important moments and various phases of my zigzagging life. That includes the many bookstores I’ve haunted over the years, starting with long gone Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach where I first discovered the joys of reading outsider literature in the incense-scented aisles.
I still read books to feel connected to humanity—to learn, get challenged, be entertained, and exercise my brain.
There are specific ways my mind lights up while engrossed with fiction or nonfiction that can’t be replicated anywhere else in my world. I find some movies/TV thought-provoking too, but they deliver the scenes fully realized and invite me to react (when I’m not simultaneously doom scrolling).
Books actively engage my brain to help create the scenes in my head. In that way, reading is more like a collaboration between the author and reader.
This James Baldwin quote from Giovanni’s Room sums it up perfectly:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
I love how those kinds of observations reverberate around my skull between bedtime reading sessions and for a few days (or weeks) after the final sentence. Those thoughts usually remain private, other times I must share them with fellow readers.
If you’ve gotten this far, I assume that includes you. Here are a few recent favorites (regardless of the year they were published):
The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky
Enshittification by Cory Doctrow
Atypical Girl by Penny Kiley
Crooks by Lou Berney
The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald
Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
The Downtown Pop Underground by Kembrew McLeod
Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto
What are your reading this summer?
Great article, Steve. Will definitely add some of these to my already too long TBR list. And I always like seeing Ross Macdonald show up. One of my biggest private eye writing inspirations.
thank you, was looking for a book, saw this and just started "contrapposto"