No More Reading
blogI have, as an experiment in living, given up reading. Since Sunday, I haven’t consumed any books, blogs, news sites, feeds, wikipedia pages, or magazines. The only words I allow myself are emails, work-related documents, and my own writing. As you can imagine, I have done a lot of writing these last few days. Wringham suggested that I extend the experiment from a week to a year and write a book about it, but I doubt that many people would be interested. The truth is that hardly anyone reads these days. Indeed, the closest most of the people at my gym come to reading is a quick glance at the backpages of The Sun.
The only aspect that makes it at all notable is that I am a reading addict, the kind of person who takes a book into the toilet even if I’m only going for a piss, the kind of idiot who can’t go five minutes without seeing if something exciting has happened somewhere in the world. Life, for the reading addict, is elsewhere. Your internal voice becomes a cacophony or other people’s irritating locutions.
Since giving up reading, I have been able to think my own thoughts, to work things out for myself rather than being reliant on wikipedia or google. My appetite for ‘great’ literature has increased. Whereas previously I was sated by blog gruel, I now fancy getting my teeth into King Lear or Montaigne once the experiment is over.
Last night, as a kind of methadone fix to relieve my need for the written word, I went to Discombobulate at the CCA, where published and unpublished writers congregate in order that they might feel wanted in a world of non-readers. I enjoyed myself but, like a heroin addict, longed for the real thing.