Reading is not a challenge

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume 3, 1923-1928

I tend to read many books at once too, precisely because I need to feel the breadth of sounds propagating from one volume to the other, so as to hear a full symphony forming both inside and outside my head. It is the only way I know of reading, because it is compelling and shakes my brain from the lethargy of everyday monotony, opening the world to the unexpected and the strange, the epiphany and the wonder. Letting words come alive as their mutual breaths move into one another, transforming into one another, I can finally experience a wayward sense of fecund peace and creative meditation, and start seeing things in a different light, setting the spiral of change into motion.

And yet, as compelling as this peculiar way of reading may sound, it is far more rewarding and ingenious that any reading challenge might be. The very expression “reading challenge” is, in my view, an insult to the act of reading. No matter how popular this practice has become in the last few years, a reading challenge will always be a move against the very concept of reading. Far from encouraging people to develop critical thinking ‒ like any authentic, solid reading would do ‒ these so-called “challenges” reduce the inherent viral subversiveness of reading into yet another facet of capitalism: performing, competing, testing, then moving on to the next big read (usually chosen by an algorhythm, not by you according to your personal interests), without ever pondering on the reasons why you are doing so, nor what you are actually achieving with taking part in this race. Because that’s what reading comes down to: a maddening race meant to prove you are better than others at reading as many books as you can. Sadly, this doesn’t sound like an intellectually compelling activity at all, but like a trite, ego-driven urge, ultimately very much similar to a dick-measuring contest. One wonders why women-identified or non-binary people should engage in such a stupid, covertly sexist activity at all.

In my view, true reading requires neither contest nor challenge. In a world where speed, profit and efficiency are the only things we are supposed to be after in order to feel “real” and functional as human beings, reading can become a revolutionary and subversive act, because it can help us reclaim our need for slow contemplation, away from productivity and performance.