Pace Yourself

Last weekend, I read a nearly 700-page book in two days. I am not, I swear, saying this as a brag, or even a humblebrag, of any sort. I am saying this more as a cautionary tale. I picked up The Raven Scholar (which comes out on Tuesday) and found that I did not want to let go of it. Sure, it’s a book about power and the abuses thereof, and about men who won’t let go of power, and people doing things out of terrible guilt, and a whole bunch of other horribly relevant stuff, but it wasn’t here. It wasn’t real. It had magic and ravens and quips, and I was not ready to step away until I ran out of pages.

Still. I feel that I probably ought to have paced myself. And this feels very difficult right now.

The headlines are dire, lately. The headlines about books are no less so. People are worried about tariffs. They are worried, constantly and vividly, about book bans, about the removal of knowledge, about institutional racism and misogyny and homophobia being given a free pass and also a nice pat on the back. Authors are anxious about their livelihoods. Everyone who’s paying attention is anxious about the amount of AI slop turning up across the world of art. Maybe people are skimming long paragraphs. Maybe they’re reading for volume. What even is reading, I saw someone ask on Bluesky this week. What does it mean to read a book? What are we doing here?

Pace yourself. Take a step back. Take a step away, maybe. Take a breath.

Teachers teach what they need to learn, says one of the instructors I watch on my little exercise bike. And writers write about what they need to do, sometimes, too. Like many other people, I see the news at least in part through the lens of the thing in which I’m invested: I see authors stressing about what everything means for publishing, librarians angry about book bans, booksellers and readers watching the first two groups and layering our own worries on top. None of this is going away. 

But I do think that maybe doomscrolling begets doomscrolling begets a sort of doom-reading. A plowing through, a more-more-more, a consumerist mentality that isn’t doing us (or the books) any favors. I feel lately as if I am simply gulping books down whole, barely digesting them. It’s a gross metaphor, I know, dangerously close to the whole perceiving-books-as-vegetables thing. Get your nutritious books! But it’s closer to aggressive grazing. The feeling of mindlessly and repetitively popping another piece of popcorn in your mouth at the movies. Satisfying, in a weird way, but not in the long run.

What is reading? What are we doing when we invest ourselves and our time in books? I want to say: It’s an act of intentionally slowing down. We readers are experiencing stories and characters and ideas that are outside of ourselves and might be new to us. We’re making our way through sentences and dialogues and paragraphs and chapters, experiencing the shape of a narrative, how all of these elements and so much more come together. We’re maybe imagining what the people look like, how they dress, how their worlds appear. Maybe we’re reading to broaden our minds or our worldviews, and maybe we’re reading just to read, maybe for escape, maybe for comfort, maybe for distraction or illumination or excitement or to cry over something sad that’s just temporary and might be resolved in just a few more pages.

In the back of my mind, while I’m reading, the world marches on. The headlines are still there. Sometimes they make more sense after I’ve been reading. Sometimes they make no sense at all. Sometimes the books make no sense, no matter how many times I reread pages, and I ask myself not What is reading but How is anyone reading—how are we absorbing anything, let alone noticing the smaller things, the details of a story, the turn of phrase an author deploys that deserves an underline or a highlight or a brief giggle of joy.

Two notions are at odds with each other in my mind. As a kid, I trained myself to save things, to keep the one nice shirt for later, for a special occasion; to eat my M&Ms one at a time by color in order to make them last. This kind of self-training sticks in your head: I need to save this for later. I might not get more. But it runs up against the idea that the time is always now. Read the book you’ve been saving. Tear through it in hours if you want to. Make the nice tea, eat the nice chocolate. Enjoy the thing. 

The answer is both; the answer is neither. The point is that if you find yourself a bit frozen, lately, a bit unsure whether you ought to be doing, how you ought to be: pace yourself. Read the book, but also call your reps, but also take care of yourself, but also don’t read all of the news if it makes you not want to, or not feel like you can, do any of the rest of the things that matter to you. No one can do everything at once. 

Trying to do everything at once leaves me feeling breathless and alarmed, which, to be fair, lately everything leaves me feeling breathless and alarmed, whether I am doing things or merely thinking about them. I read The Raven Scholar so quickly partly because I felt breathless and alarmed, and partly because it was just that compelling, and partly because while I read it, I forgot to feel terribly about everything else. Some part of me feels like that wasn’t fair to the book; some part of me feels like that wasn’t fair to me.

What I mean is: We still have to keep functioning, on some level. Doing the things, the basic things—food, bills, work—and the good things. Family, friends, laughter, touching grass. The good things, even in the midst of everything else, are worth savoring. Reading is a good thing. I don’t mean that in a good for you way; I mean that in every way. Joy, learning, experiencing, understanding, broadening, entertaining, escaping: all the things. Good things deserve your time and attention. Slow down. Pace yourself.