#MOC19: On Reading Again

Once a week, my devices present to me a summary of how I’ve spent my screen time for the previous week—how many minutes I’ve spent listening to music, or watching Netflix, or using social media. Reading and Reference always seem to dominate my totals; I suspect if I had a magical app betraying how I’ve occupied all the hours of my entire life, reading would still be right up there at the top. In 2019, according to Goodreads, I was finishing about a book a week for a cumulative total of roughly 16,000 pages…and I thought 2019 was a pretty slow year for reading.

(I’ve just spent a pleasant few minutes off on a tangent, trying to figure out how and why in 2011 I consumed roughly twice as many books and pages as last year. But then I recalled I spent the first half of 2011 on my own in Detroit, not working while I waited for my house to sell so that I could move to Connecticut—and that the second half of the year I had just moved to Connecticut without knowing anyone or having much to do. Plowing through 30,000 pages makes sense in that context. I’m convinced that half of those belonged to the enjoyable, yet interminable, Little Dorrit.)

One might assume in these long days of social isolation because to COVID-19, all of which I’ve spent exclusively within the boundaries of my house for extended periods of time, reading would be the ideal pursuit for enforced leisure. Even writing that sentence, I envision chilly March days under a woolen throw with a book in hand. Or, as the tense early weeks of quarantine extended into warmer weather, languid afternoons on my front porch in the early summer, feet kicked up as I spend hours engrossed in a juicy novel.

And yet, since this virus shut down the world as I know it, I largely haven’t been able to read. Not at all.

Looking at Goodreads again, the site I’ve used for a decade to track and review the books crossing my nightstand, I can see that the year got off to a brisk clip. I very much enjoyed Dorothy Parker’s Complete Broadway: 1918-1923, an endearing, funny, and hefty collection of the acid-tongued writer’s Broadway reviews. I bounced through the third volume of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Sky trilogy in three days; I read a manual of style, Dreyer’s English, from cover to cover and very much enjoyed its quirky approach to syntax (and appreciated its advice). I zipped through a biography of Elaine Stritch, then another autobiography by artist Peter McGough.

In March, doors began to shut. Businesses closed; what remained of Dorothy Parker’s Broadway shuttered. If I read, it was headlines about spiking death rates, or news stories peddling conflicting advice on how to keep safe during the maelstrom. My poor brain couldn’t take too much of the real world and its horrors, though. It proved easier to find activities that would focus my thoughts on a tiny subset of activity, like maneuvering pixels around the screen in a video game…or shut down my brain entirely, by streaming trashy shows on Netflix.

Reading isn’t as easy as flipping on reality TV and letting it blare away. Reading requires concentration. The pandemic seemed to make concentration impossible. Reading requires imagination, and my imagination was already on overdrive, day in and day out, conjuring nightmare scenarios in which I or people I loved got sick, or ran out of access to foods and medicines or their homes.

Oh, I tried to get into books. I had a biography on Churchill I’d started right before everything shut down. Reading about London in the Blitz, though, seemed too self-indulgently cruel an activity when it felt like a biological Blitz going on around us. I’d received another fantasy from N. K. Jemisin the second week of the shutdown that in better times might’ve taken me a day or two to devour. Engaging and often delightful though it was (and as prescient as it turned out to be, with its alien foe manifesting as an army of Karens weaponizing the NYC police force against its heroes and heroines of color), it took me two months to get through The City We Became. Though the book was good, compelling myself to attempt a page or two at a time left me feeling drained. I took no pleasure in the reading.

After that experience, I stopped trying to read altogether. Weeks passed. And then I remembered Little Women.

I’d read Little Women once in early grade school, liking the adventures of the March sisters very much until the halfway mark when Mr. March returns from the front and Little Women becomes Good Wives. When the escapades became meditations on married life and lectures on anger management, my ten-year-old self checked out. I’d revisited the book in my thirties and enjoyed it quite a bit, but in the years since, my memory of exactly what happens in the narrative had dimmed to the point that if you were to ask me the novel’s plot, I would’ve told you it was a Scarface-like examination of Concord’s underground barter economy and of Amy March, who had established herself tooth and nail as its kingpin by ruthlessly cornering the market in pickled limes. Then [spoiler alert] Beth dies. The end.

I don’t know why the pickled limes made such an impression on me. But over the holidays last year, in a vanished time when people gathered in crowds in dark enclaves to view flickering images on their walls, we saw the Greta Gerwig film of Little Women. I was astonished that the pickled limes were barely mentioned. The first half of the movie resurrected some dormant memories of Alcott’s story, but I found the Good Wives half—the grown-up part I’d pretended wasn’t there in previous readings—almost the more interesting. Sometime around the new year, I downloaded a copy of Little Women to my Kindle and made a resolution to check it out once again in the months to come.

In late June, when the temperatures soared and the afternoons seemed to stretch out along with them, I made some fitful attempts to read again. It had been a long six weeks since I’d finally clawed my way to the finish line of The City We Became. I thought dipping my toes into the new entry of a silly time-travel series I enjoy might rekindle my lifelong love of curling up with a good book. Apparently the book wasn’t good enough. I tried the Churchill biography again, but couldn’t take more than a page at a time without the contradictory pulls of listlessness and restlessness both. Many times I walked to the water’s edge with different new titles. I could never submerge.

Then I returned to Little Women. I lay stretched out on a lounge in the early summer heat, picked up my Kindle, and tapped on the title that had sat there since the holidays. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” was the first sentence.

And I thought, Girrrrrl, I sure know that feeling. This entire year of 2020 feels like Christmas without any presents. Maybe I could sit a while with this fifteen-year-old life disrupted by a war splitting her country in two.

Alcott’s narrative quickly began working its magic. I zipped through two chapters. Five. Ten. I found myself finishing the book over the course of three lazy afternoons, weeping at Beth’s tender moments, cheering for Jo’s successes, sympathizing with the nuances of Meg’s marital woes, and finding a new appreciation for Amy. It honestly felt like I’d stumbled onto the joy of reading all over again.

Over the last several years I’ve been attempting to achieve a certain balance in my leisure reading habits; I keep an even ratio between novels and non-fiction; I try to intersperse some classics I never attempted along with the genre fiction to which I gravitate most readily. Though from time to time I’ll revisit volumes I’ve known and loved before, in my teens and twenties I was such a heavy re-reader of books I knew and enjoyed—like Little Women, maybe—that I’ve tried ever since to maintain moderation.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe it’s okay for me to take a break for a while from new titles. All of us in the midst of this pandemic face daily uncertainties and novelties. Every day seems to bring some new viral horror story, or an invasion of killer hornets, or a fresh anxiety to conquer. With enough ambiguity around me, did I knowingly need to chart unknown territory in my reading list, too?

Perhaps letting myself bask in the tried and true might be just the prescription I needed. Re-reading a novel isn’t a bad thing: if I’m not finding pleasure in new titles, why not return to the ones I know and love?

That’s why, after bringing to a conclusion my afternoons with the March sisters, I immediately jumped into Charles Dickens. David Copperfield is one of my all-time favorites. It’s the only popular Dickens novel I was never assigned to read during high school, college, or grad school, so I didn’t pick it up until my thirties. The earliest chapters captivated me immediately once again when I picked it up for this re-read. I laughed aloud at the absurdities of Betsey Trotwood. I cheered for loyal Peggotty and her Yarmouth relations who lived in a little land-locked boat. I shivered at the Murdstones, and smiled whenever the coach driver would assert, “Barkis is willin’.” Chapter after chapter I gulped down, delighting in the strokes with which Dickens paints his characters, admiring how even the most secondary among them gets to display moments of tenderness and humanity.

I’d breathlessly devour every chapter, then turn the page to the next. An hour or two would pass before I realized how mesmerized I’d been by the words on the page. Losing myself like that in a good story, reveling in the printed words—I’d feared I’d lost those things for good with the pandemic.

Even now, in the middle of David Copperfield’s adventures, I can’t help but think about what favorites I’ll be reading next, just to relive the glow of excitement they cast upon me years ago. The delightful social absurdities of E. F. Benson? Patrick Dennis’ acerbic satires? A deep delve into the fantasies of Anne McCaffrey? I don’t really know, and it doesn’t much matter. I’m simply thrilled to have recaptured a relish for reading again—and, thanks to Little Women, to have given myself permission to spend the next few months with stories I’ve long loved.





This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .