We talk a big game about reading rituals, we book people. Comfy chairs, blankets, hot cocoa, a cup of tea, a perfectly matched beer, a favorite whiskey. I’m as likely as the next person to say something about reading seasons, about summer on the balcony or fall on the bar patio, about the ideal space and time in which I’d like to read a book.
But for all that, I don’t really have any reading rituals—save for that satisfying moment of putting a finished book in its exact right place on the shelf.
Do you?
I’ve been thinking about rituals because I spent part of last week engrossed in Byung-Chul Han’s brilliant short book The Disappearance of Rituals. It’s more of a long essay, 90 or so pages in which Han deconstructs the ritual’s place in society, and what it means in a world that doesn’t value them. He writes in the introduction, “The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual. Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly. … Along the way, the pathologies of the present day will become visible, most of all the erosion of community.”
There’s already so much to unpack here, and the whole little book is like that. Not every one of the author’s points resonated with me, but so much of it did—so much about the idea of communication without community, and the destructive power of capitalistic emphasis on production, and the simple sentence, “Time that rushes off is not habitable.” Han quotes writers and philosophers from across decades, including The Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who “describes rituals as temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.”
That phrase stopped me short. It seemed to encapsulate so much of what’s been missing for the last three years (if not longer)—to describe the things that I had never thought of as rituals, but that are exactly that if you look from another angle. What is an author event if not a ritual way of presenting your work to an audience? It has its norms, its traditions, some of which ought to be broken. What is a preorder if not a ritual of hope? What is going to a concert but a ritual of collective enjoyment? What is a restaurant, a friendly greeting to the person on the next barstool, a festival, a movie? They’re rituals of community, and only some of us can safely take part in them right now.
It would be foolish to only take from this book an interest in personal, isolated rituals, but at a moment when gathering is fraught, maybe what we need are more of these techniques—ways to make ourselves feel more at home in the world even in isolation and on our own. Let me rephrase: What I need is absolutely this.
But to be honest, I don’t know what this looks like.
I’ve read about writers’ rituals plenty: The blank page; the candle and clear desk; the tactic of ending a day’s work with an unfinished sentence, so you know exactly where to start in the morning. But we’re here to talk about reading, and I know—from comments, from social media, from reading essays, from talking to friends—that reading hasn’t been what it used to be, these last years. We’ve struggled to focus, and we’ve struggled with genres and authors we usually love. We’re slower, we’re more forgetful, we read three pages and then go back and realize we retained nothing, or we rush through and remember only the highest highs and lowest lows.
Maybe the first step is to give ourselves permission for all of this to be okay.
In September, I started exercising in earnest. (I promise this is not going to be about the glory of exercise. Promise.) I was determined, for specific health reasons, to get into the habit of doing this thing—this thing I did not want to do—that would help me be stronger.
It’s a ritual. I change. I fill my water bottle. I open the program with the peppy people who tell me what to do. I roll out a mat in the narrow space between desk and bookcase. Maybe I put on shoes, maybe I don’t, depending on the class. I push play. And then I try. I swear, I complain, I modify, I laugh in the instructor’s digital face. I can’t do everything. Sometimes I lie on the mat and groan. But I took the steps. I did the ritual of exercise. I’m in it. Perfection is unnecessary.
Buy the Book
Some Desperate Glory
I don’t want to suggest that reading become a chore, a thing we make ourselves do. (Though somewhere along the way, this exercise ritual stopped being a thing I made myself do and started being a thing I look forward to doing.) But maybe just sitting down with a book and hoping we’re going to suddenly have the focus, the attention span, the wherewithal, even just the energy for sustained reading—maybe that’s not giving our reading selves enough of a chance.
Sometimes, even now, that happens. I read half of The Disappearance of Ritual on Saturday morning, which seems to be a time that I like to sit with a book for as long as possible. I’ve been picking up nonfiction books and reading single chapters in between doing other things, using them—or the other things—like little palate cleansers that enable me to shift gears more smoothly.
Sometimes, though, reading time is something I take for granted. I hunch over dinner, flipping pages on my phone, half in and half out, or I flip between an essay in one tab, Wordle in another, and Slack in a third, my mind fully on none of them. Some days we’re lucky if we get to read at all; some of us have too many demands on our time, other people to look out for, homework, work days that run long. Reading time can feel like a luxury.
So let’s luxuriate in it. Let’s find the things that help us settle, that let us shut out the rest of the world for the time, however brief, that we’re reading. Set the stage, make the tea, get out the blanket you got for this express purpose and then absolutely forgot about because it was in the closet and therefore out of sight and mind. Leave your phone in another room if you possibly can. Whatever steps feel right for you, take them. And then take them again, and again, and again, until your mind and body know that this is what you’re doing: giving yourself permission to do nothing, for a time, but read.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
Oooh! I am going to come back to this, but I just saw this painting in real life at the Detroit Institute of Arts Van Gogh exhibit that we visited on NYE :) I liked it as I do also relate :) Although I feel like she maybe needs some more light!
Twenty-five-ish years ago, while I was still working, I noticed that books were…slipping…sliding away when I tried to grasp my memory of them. I started a ritual of writing reviews for my reads. I enjoyed it, I found. I never liked the book-report kind of “review” so I’d sit down with, say, Martha Wells’s THE ELEMENT OF FIRE that came out that week and plunge into what it meant to me (and work off a little steam aimed at useless privileged pointless wastes of space). It was in a notebook not typed for submission, there was no filter I needed to apply, and I genuinely did not think it was work. The fact was that, after writing a review, I retained a heap more.
Blogs came around; unsurprisingly I went there. Nobody much followed me…then came LibraryThing and after that Goodreads and Twitter, and suddenly all the “work” of fixing my thoughts to a page had to be done in 140 characters. (Even at 280, I am not laconic enough to do more than shout “GO LOOK AT MY BLOG I WROTE A REVIEW!!”) Twenty-five years? Thirty, maybe? my ritual is thinking through what I think of a book’s success or failure in reaching the aims I was told it set and then either praising or not.
After the social sites opened up, the conversations could get very spirited and contentious. But the ritual has grounded me for a lot of my life, in improving ways.
Okay, now that I am back to this, I love it. In part as I am very much a person who takes comfort in little rituals, in things that mark the days, the seasons or other things of importance (even if that thing is me).
I also found that during the early days of covid, back when we were still more or less locked down, working from home, etc, I struggled at first. A lot of my reading used to happen on my bus commute, but now that wasn’t happening. I do enjoy reading at meals (bad manners, but oh well) but for the most part I just wasn’t reading a lot.
As we moved through that spring I started creating comfy spaces for myself, and really enjoying our backyard. We have lilac bushes out there (my favorite flower) so then I started getting in the habit – once weather permit (in WI that takes awhile, as spring is not a gentle season) – of drinking tea (one of my covid indulgences was ordering all sorts of fancy teas from various places) while sitting outside and reading. I’ve started to keep that up in the summer, as well as the fall. It’s actually part of what got me back into just sitting and reading instead of trying to squeeze it in, and while I don’t do it quite as much as I did that year (it was one of the only times I actually left the house and saw something other than my home office) I still take a lot of joy out of doing it. I’m glad I rediscovered the joy of just sitting out there.
While I’ve never managed to make working out a positive ritual (I love sleep too much) I do find that walking and biking are rituals I’ve been able to re-claim as well (especially when I was going stir crazy) and have carried forward with me.
Last night I sat down with a library book and began to read. My computer was also open in front of me, and I responded to a message as it came in. Which reminded me of something I wanted to add to my play script in progress. The next thing I knew, the play script was a page and a half longer, and I wasn’t reading. This was a strange turnabout from a life where reading a novel would have been the distracting pleasure. But I don’t feel like I was wasting time by writing the play. Interestingly, I then picked up the novel again and it sucked me in for a few hours until past my bedtime, and I am still thinking about it.
Habits I’ve continued – I always read in the bath. Even though I need to wear glasses now.
Habits that have changed –
For about 50 years, I could not get to sleep without reading (usually fiction and always hardcopy). Then for a while I shifted to listening to music. Now, I read to sleep about half the time, and about half the time my own thoughts feel more interesting. I don’t have a great fix for trying to lie on my side on my pillow with my glasses on, either.
For much of my adult life, I’ve loved the routine of going to a restaurant by myself and reading before the meal and sometimes during it. Since Covid, though, I generally don’t go to indoor restaurants unless someone else is with me, so I just read until my friend arrives.
I also used to read on the bus – but now I’m a vehicle owner, and someone who works at home half the time.
I still read several books a week, counting rereads and counting library e-books that I mostly read on the laptop browser. But I often feel like I don’t have a routine of reading, that I can’t settle to it because I don’t have the right chair or something. Very interesting question, thank you!
1. I always have one audiobook and one “regular” book going at one time. I listen to the audiobook using my phone whenever I’m in the car, doing housework/laundry, or any other “mindless” task where I have to use my hands or move around.
2. I read on my iPad via the Kindle app, my library’s ebook. app, the Glose app, and the Nook app. When I work out in the morning, I use the elliptical and set my iPad on the shelf in front of me. I only need to tap the screen to turn the page and can set the font as large as I need to. Reading while on the elliptical ensures me an hour of reading every day.
3. I track and review every book I read on Goodreads. I like being able to go back and see what I thought about a book if a friend mentions it. I like the motivation of seeing how many books I finish each year.
4. I always carry a purse large enough to fit my iPad, and I carry it everywhere I go. If I’m kept waiting somewhere, it’s never a waste. I can read instead of wasting time on my phone.
5. I keep a “to be read” list on a note on my phone and update it regularly, deleting things I’ve changed my mind about, prioritizing them, listing books that have yet to be published.
I’ve never had universal reading rituals. Summer library haul reading habit: haul pile of books down to the cool basement, gulp books down all afternoon long. College rituals to try to focus on particular textbooks: sometimes, but intermittent. There are high points of Reading Situation Perfection – hammocks, cozy-sofa-with-blanket-and-hot-drink-and-snow-or-leaves-falling-outside – but my reading has always been book-focused, not habitat-focused.
However, 1. this is delightful, and 2. now I want to read that book, and also 3. can we talk sometime about how some book titles sound exactly like the mythical book you especially want to read, but then don’t match the book? (There are also books whose title transfixed me, but where the book did not disappoint, like Ruth Quibell’s “The Promise of Things” – the only flaw was that I wanted more of it. But is it that there is a greater diversity of titles now? Or that people are getting better at titles? Or is it just that some of us need… kind of a lot… right now, and most books can’t deliver it all?)
@@.-@ – I love bathtub reading. I mostly take showers now (in part because baths get lukewarm too fast for me) but I will bring a book into a hot tub (or, read on my phone’s Kindle app, which is one of the few times I prefer e-books, as my phone is water resistant). But my ‘feeling crummy/sick’ routine is to draw a hot bath and read Summers at Castle Auburn, my main comfort book :) And then eventually move out of the tub and into a bed with my heating pad, haha.
I also love restaurant/bar reading. I travel for business a few times a year and one of my favorite things to do is go out to eat by myself, take a seat at the bar and just read.
@5 – I just bought myself a new purse for Christmas and my 100% first requirement for all my purses is “Can this hold a large book?” Not just a paperback (although I prefer that), but a tome if necessary.
I also have found that lately, my bus habit has actually been listening to music instead of reading, and I’ve also gotten back into creative writing so sometimes that takes precedence over reading.
Hmmm . . .
I do take some of the points about ritual in general; it can be nice to have and our society misses it. Although at the same time, in societies that have a lot of it, they tend to be less about making oneself at home in the world and more about the world imposing a home on you, whether it’s the one you like or not. So there’s certainly some ambiguity about the stuff.
As to rituals around reading . . . when I was a kid, I could be happy reading in a cupboard. I’m a bit creakier now, but still, I’m not going to restrict my reading to certain formalized opportunities. Just yesterday, as I walked home in the dark, I unlimbered my little LED reading light, attached it to my book, and read as I trudged down the sidewalk; when I was younger I sometimes dashed from streetlight to streetlight then walked slowly under the pool of light, reading another paragraph. Even so, I do like sitting comfortably in my armchair with a book and a beer stein full of chocolate milk and maybe some cookies or something. Is that a ritual or just adding all the comfy things together for the best outcome?
Usually I didn’t really have a reading ritual (or perhaps I have a bunch of little ones, like bringing my book to every doctor’s appointment [and trust me there are a ton] so I have something to do while waiting in the waiting room, or waiting for the doctor after the nurse has seen me, or waiting for my turn with testing, or— You get the idea), but lately I’ve been trying to have one. Reading’s been difficult recently (potentially due to an undiagnosed neurological issue), so I’ve been talking with a new friend who is a big reader about this, and his reading ritual seemed like a good idea to me, so I’ve tried to come up with my own version. I do my PT exercises and then my goal is to read for half an hour while lying on my heating pad, and then maybe for half an hour more in the living room while hanging out with my cat. This does not happen. I’m often interrupted since it’s late morning at that point. But it does seem like it should be “me time” since I just worked on healing my body. Maybe I just have to make this a more rigid boundary.
I don’t have much of a reading ritual when it comes to where or when I read, but I like to “make it social”: review it on goodreads after I’m done, tweet my reactions as they come, stop reading to tell someone across the room what is happening in the book, or – if none of the above are practical and I’m reading a paperback copy – annotate the book with my reactions.
Now i am almost pensioned, i have the luxury to start my day reading in bed, before i begin my day . Having a comfy, quiet place, helps me reading the books i enjoy for my book clubs.
I never realized the value of chapters until now. And I realize that even if an analogue to chapters were an obvious feature for social media, they wouldn’t have them, because they would encourage putting the media app away after a short while: very unprofitable.