Silencing the Voices Long Enough to Read

I wrote this long crazy post about Mohists, but Tor.com’s running it now, which is great!  On the other hand, it leaves me sans a load-bearing post.

So, let’s do some housekeeping:

1. I have a Boskone schedule!  It’s posted on the events page!

2. Full Fathom Five ended up on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2014, along with a whole bunch of other books you should read.  Everything I’ve read on here is amazing.  Also there’s a Locus Reader’s Poll, apparently.

3. The new issue of Lightspeed features a novella by Brooke Bolander, which I haven’t had the time to read yet but heard her read excerpts from at ReaderCon last year, and I’m excited to have the whole thing waiting for me in my e-reader when I finish chewing my way through these Shanghai history books for SEKRET PROJEKT.

4. On a similar note, I’m really excited for the new issue of Uncanny Magazine, featuring short fiction by Amal El-Mohtar and Ann Leckie!

I’ve been reading a lot recently—non-screen, long-form, bound-book reading.  This may sound weird or elementary for a professional writer to say, but, folks, reading’s great.  I am transported.  I explore strange new worlds.  I seek out new life and new civilizations—I mean, yes, that’s Star Trek, but it’s also my reading life.  There’s a reason LeVar Burton is the guy who makes the Enterprise go.

Part of the reason I read less than I did when I was in high school & college, I realized recently, is that back then I tended to read until someone Of Higher Stature flat out told me to stop reading.  “Time for dinner!”  Or, I had to get to class.  Or,  etc.  The key here is, whenever I wasn’t affirmatively required to be doing something, I by default sank into a book.

Adulthood, or something like adulthood, has put the kibosh on that strategy.  Nobody requires me to do anything any more.  Hell, I’m a full-time writer; I could just stay at home in my PJs all day eating gummy bears and watching Cartoon Network and only a handful of people would even know until the whole system crashed down in flames around me.  But in order to earn adulthood I had to learn how to require myself to do things.  I had to internalize the need to take out the trash, cook, shop for groceries, work out, clean the bathroom, to sit down and work even when I really don’t want to.  In the halcyon days of yore, I had to do what people told me to, but only that.  These days, few people tell me to do anything—because I’ve built all these systems that make sure there’s food on the table, the house isn’t falling down, the sink hasn’t gone sentient, etc.  Some of those are real systems, GTD style.  Some of those are background processes.

If I start reading and really let myself go, I can read for hours at a stretch.  And since I know that, I’m careful—and for years I did the reading equivalent of constantly myclonic-twitching awake just before you hit REM sleep. I’d never let myself go, because I was always calling to myself from inside my own head: “time to make dinner!  Time to clean the bathroom!  Time to sweep!  Time to take all that stuff to the post office that you’ve been putting off for the last two weeks!  And shouldn’t you get started on your tax paperwork?”

Recently, and this’ll seem stupidly straightforward to you all, I’ve started setting a timer.  I can decide, for forty-five minutes at a time, that I want to read.  That’s how I want to spend this bit of leisure.  Kitchen and bathroom and dust and junk piles and emergency emails will still be there after forty-five minutes.

But for those forty-five minutes, I’m gone.

It’s great.

Also, I’m trying to read more broadly.  A friend of mine last year read only books by women, which I admired but can’t quite emulate because I want to stay caught up on my friends’ books, and not all my friends are women.  So for months now I’ve been working to make sure I don’t read two books by straight white cis men in a row.  Now, this sort of approach has its own issues (for one thing, it can, in its failure mode, sort of norm straight white cis-dudes, and by extension it plays into the whole problematic “feminine-Other” association a la Said), but so far it’s been great.  This process hasn’t changed my normal reading habits much, to be honest, but it has encouraged me to prospect for new authors and break out of hegemonic ruts.  And, it’s helped me spot uncomfortable subconscious biases.  (“James Baldwin’s amazing! Why didn’t I read him before now?  …. Oh.  Oh.  Well, shit.”)

Aaaaanyway.  Books are great.  Reading is fun!  Be well.