My New Year's Resolution? Read Less
A new year often signals a fresh TBR (To Be Read) pile. It brims with good intentions, guilt divided evenly between Christmas gifts begging to be addressed and the books from 2023 you thought you had time to read but didn't. But — of course — reading shouldn't be a chore, an endless game of catch-up or a slog powered by a sense that you're missing out on the best of the year's crop.
In the wonderful phrase of a friend, perhaps it's time to set an anti-resolution instead — to settle into a slow classic, and give yourself the gift of unrushed reading. Spending time in the pages of just one book for months, sometimes years, is a rarity in our hurried age.
Like many readers, I buy books all the time; it's hard to linger. Yet I remember the keen satisfaction of a teenage summer spent reading all of Jane Austen's novels, or of autumn 2023, when I re-read Vikram Seth's （印度小说家，诗人） 1,349-page A Suitable Boy (1993), feeling a bittersweet nostalgia for the way India was before it turned towards fierce nationalism.
I admit I steal this idea from the best kind of experts: writers who understand the value of paying attention to the past. Brandon Taylor （美国黑人作家）, the American novelist, spent two years steadily reading Zola （19世纪法国自然主义小说家和理论家）. “Took two years, three apartments, 3 (or 40) countries ... The world spun and I read Zola, ” he posted on Instagram a few months ago.
Another author, Yiyun Li （李翊云，旅美华人作家）, spends six months every year on War and Peace（《战争与和平》） and six months on Herman Melville's （19世纪美国最伟大的小说家、散文家和诗人之一） Moby-Dick （《白鲸》）. “I alternate between the two novels every year, just to keep my life structured by two great books,” she said in a 2021 interview with literary magazine The Millions. “It's sort of like your daily bread, right?”
Writing in 1925, in the essay “How Should One Read A Book?”, Virginia Woolf （20世纪英国女作家、文学批评家和文学理论家） urged people to consume a text as if they were writing it: “Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal.”
What both Li and Woolf are driving at, I think, is not slowing down for the sake of it. Nor is this a sentimental desire to return to another age, shorn of X and TikTok. Reading more slowly teaches you to sharpen your attention, to go back and reread, to pause and turn to dictionaries or encyclopedias or biographies when you fumble for understanding.
To Woolf, reading was not a passive or idle act, but one that required readers to “bend our imaginations powerfully”, an “arduous and exhausting” and yet rewarding occupation. Her advice is beautifully contradictory: read books twice, for pleasure but also for depth, she says, but remember also to “skip and saunter （悠闲地走，漫步）” through a book, rather than gritting your teeth and over-reading. What Woolf wants us to reach is “the greater intensity and truth of fiction”.
I speed-read often, a hazard of the profession, but with books I love, or which strike some nerve or chord, I almost always go back over a period of days or months. I need that time for the writing to sink in, to reveal itself. My version of Li's “daily bread” has often been The Mahabharata （《摩诃婆罗多》）, the ancient Indian epic, which changes meaning and continues to surprise me every decade. I promise that if you commit to a classic or a story cycle of your choice, your relationship with reading itself will change, quieten and deepen.
But a word to the wise: think carefully about your choice of classic, and how much time you actually have on your hands. In 1995, Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker and curator, started a Finnegans Wake* reading club at a library in Venice, California. He was in his forties; anywhere from 10 to 30 readers would join, navigating a couple of pages of James Joyce's* notoriously opaque novel aloud most months. Last October, they finally reached the last page.
Notes:
* Finnegans Wake： 《芬尼根的守灵夜》，詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce） 创作的一部小说，被认为是现代主义文学的经典之作。这部小说以流畅的语言和复杂的结构展示了人类的梦境、幻觉和意识流。
* James Joyce：詹姆斯·乔伊斯（1882-1941），爱尔兰诗人、作家。后现代主义文学的开山鼻祖，其代表作《尤利西斯》《一个青年艺术家的画像》《芬尼根的守灵夜》 和《都柏林人》 在世界文学史上占有举足轻重的地位。 乔伊斯一生颠沛流离，辗转于欧洲各地，靠教授英语和写作糊口，晚年饱受眼疾之痛，几近失明。 但他一生坚持文学创作，终成一代巨匠。