Be more creative: read a book

Actor, comedian, dear friend and work colleague Beth Granville woke up on Sunday morning with a start: her alarm wasn’t ringing.

Fuck.

She had a sitcom recording to get to.

Fuck.

She grappled with her phone, eyes swimming in an abyss of darkness. An unresponsive power button; rising panic.

Luckily, it appeared that Beth’s phone was the sole victim of a vicious electromagnetic pulse attack, localised in the Wanstead area.

The rest of the capital’s telecommunications network and transport infrastructure was, thankfully, still working and Beth got to the recording studio just in time.

The only embarrassment, apart from losing the phone numbers of every comedy producer she’d met since 2018, came when Beth had to ask someone on the tube what the time was. Lucky not to be arrested, frankly.

But the black screen of death was the harbinger of an unexpected light.

Phoneless Beth picked up a book and finished it in two days.

~

As some of you know, over the last few months I’ve been much more deliberate about my reading.

Too much of my day is spent, not on my phone, but on my computer: either working or worrying that I should be working.

The computer, to me, symbolises the one true god of productivity. How poisonously wrongheaded!

This winter, I found a way around this awful bias, a way to trick myself into truly valuing the time I spend eyeballs deep in a book, without feeling guilty.

Today, I record focussed reading time as work time and ‘bill’ the hours in my working diary accordingly. (No one pays me, of course, at least not directly…)

I set my work timer for 45 minutes, sit down with a pile of sticky tabs and read, marking beautiful or fascinating passages and new words or concepts as I go.

As Beth discovered, and I readiscovered: reading is wonderful.

(Does ‘readiscovered’ work? Not sure. Let’s say yes.)

~

I’ve quoted Dr Ruth J Simmons before and I shall do so again:

If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.

Reading is restorative and relaxing in a way that computers or phones will never be.

At the end of my 45 minutes’ reading, I feel enriched in the equal and opposite way that I am exhausted by 45 minutes of browsing the same amount of material on the internet.

A couple of times this week I’ve even taken my book out to the pine woods near where I’m staying in Bournemouth, set up my hammock and gently swung through the pages for an hour or so. (Tuesday was interesting: sunshine and hail.)

This isn’t a lone response from someone who grew up reading.

Reading a book relieves stress, can help you empathise with others, and builds your vocabulary, which may help you manage your own mental health by giving you a larger palette of emotions.

Note: Fiction seems to offer more to our brains here than non-fiction.

Side note: Science fiction in particular might offer our brains something particularly valuable at the moment — the sense that the future is malleable and open to change.

~

Books also offer a counterpoint to the pell and mell of news, which I’ve written about and insulted before. As Marcel Proust said, long ago:

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

One of my reading mentors, Ryan Holiday, deliberately weights his reading choices towards ‘timeless’ books.

‘I don’t want to read things that are very quickly proven irrelevant or incorrect,’ he says in an interview with Tim Ferriss (~1h51). He continues:

You’d be better off sitting down and reading Shakespeare’s plays because they have not only had 500 years of cultural impact, but will probably have 500 more years of cultural impact.

Think of what Ryan Holiday calls ‘the halflife of information’. The news that fires itself, cannon-like, out of your radio has a halflife of perhaps a day or two: tomorrow the triviality will be forgotten.

But a book has already proven itself durable: even a book published this year has probably been a couple of years in the making. If a reputable publisher was involved, the ideas and concepts are, if not timeless, then at least enduring.

~

Too many people write reading off as unproductive and it’s true that sitting down with your head in a book can look an awful lot like doing nothing.

Inside your skull, however, your brain is doing imaginative weight-lifting.

Reading strengthens language processing areas of the brain, as you might expect, but it is also a tremendously embodied experience: we truly live the novels we read.

Explaining the results of a study that showed long-term changes in brain connectivity among 21 people forced to read a Robert Harris novel, a team of neuroscientists from Emory University wrote:

It is plausible that the act of reading a novel places the reader in the body of the protagonist, which may alter somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity. … Reading stories … affect the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions.

Humans are wonderful fabulists: reading is the next best thing to being there.

Reading itself is a creative act. Of course, good books are full of good ideas and I can’t count the number of passages that have changed the way I write, permanently.

Last week’s newsletter, for example, was built entirely out of my reading from the week.

You’d expect reading to enhance creativity in writers, of course, but reading and writing themselves are significantly correlated with creativity.

It’s the same for Beth. I don’t know what book she was reading, but when she saw this picture between its covers, she laughed out loud and added a caption that has done rather well on Twitter…

@BettyGranville

I think this one’s called ‘Dating Actors’

~

Next Thursday is World Book Day. Lots of places, like the National Trust, are putting on book-themed events, mostly for dratted kids.

World Book Day is not to be confused (as I always do) with World Book Night on 23 April.

Two whole festivals of books — eat my shorts, World Internet Day!

Books of the Year 2018

As I’ve mentioned previously, I keep data. I’m particularly proud of the data I have collected over the last 6 years about my reading.

Firstly because I think reading is quite good, and keeping the data reminds me how important books are for my contentment.

Secondly because my reading tells a story.

For example, I finished a total of 41 books in 2018 – that’s 46% more than last year – and I read twice as much fiction.

Sherlock Holmes would deduce from this information that I had much more free time to spend reading in bed, and that, in all likelihood, I did not have a girlfriend. Elementary!

Anyway, enough chit-chat. Here are the 7 books I’m most glad I read this year, in order of their date of first publication.


FICTION

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)

This is actually the second time I’ve read this astonishing novel, but the first time was about 17 years pre-spreadsheet so basically never happened.

It has been said that the British were so traumatised by the Second World War that the survivors couldn’t muster the creative energy to write a truly defining war novel.

The missing space on our collective bookshelf, it has been said, was (appropriately enough) occupied by the Americans and, in particular, by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

But in my opinion (and I wasn’t there) the horrifying aesthetics, the elaborate grotesquerie and the shadowy skulduggery of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (of which Titus Groan is the first volume) was exactly the novel that the Second World War deserved.

It’s also very funny.


PSYCHOLOGY / HISTORY / MEMOIR

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl (1946)

Wait, did I only read this book for the first time this year?

This book has been so instrumental in my thought patterns for the past 9 months that I can’t possibly have only finished it in March.

But the spreadsheet doesn’t lie.

I’ve written about this short masterpiece far too much in this newsletter already, but if you’re catching up then here’s the link to my famous 5-a-Day Book Cult.

(Incidentally, I’m pondering another accessibly high-brow Book Cult next year. Maybe Marcus Aurelius. How does that sound?


WRITING

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee (2013)

This is nothing more than a collection of essays that long-form non-fiction specialist-generalist John McPhee has written about his craft, and previously published in The New Yorker and elsewhere.

In other words, it is an indispensable logbook for any writers who one day dream of, say, writing a whole book about a tennis Grand Slam semi-final.

McPhee’s writing process is singular, and he is well-aware of the luxuries he has enjoyed with editors over the years. But his commitment to structure (how the heck do you write a whole book about one tennis match?) is an inspiration to us lesser mortals.

McPhee also shows us around his Luddite collection of low-tech and no-tech writing tools that fondly remind me of my own attachment to the now-out-of-production Alphasmart Neo.


NATURE

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2015)

This book made headlines for popularising the ‘Wood Wide Web’, the idea that plants, and in particular trees, communicate with each other through a network of fungal connections in the soil.

The headlines were deserved, but the book goes much further.

Peter Wohlleben is himself a forester, which lends an authority to the book that would be missing were it written by a generalist, or even an academician.

I believe him when he argues that trees in a forest care for each other when they are sick, to the point of sending vital nutrients to mere stumps.

I believe him as he carefully builds a vision of a forest as a society operating on time scales that are scarcely imaginable, let alone observable to the human eye.

I believe him when he suggests that this society of trees is as important to humanity and the rest of our ecosystem as the oxygen we breathe or the water that nourishes us.

And, when he politely points out that the forest is the only reason that we have such an amenable atmosphere in the first place, I believe him.


PSYCHOLOGY / NEUROSCIENCE

How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman-Barrett (2017)

I remember banging on about this book back in the summer. And I’m going to bang on about it again, goddammit.

Lisa Feldman-Barrett is a practising neuroscientist. This makes me like her.

In this book, she turns the ‘classical’ model of emotion completely on its head. This makes me like her even more.

To sum up her argument in one sentence would be grossly unfair to Feldman-Barrett and do the book a heinous disservice.

So here we go:

Emotion is a social construct: it’s a linguistic concept like ‘hot’, ‘ours’ or ‘breakfast’, and has a social reality that is not ‘real’ out there in the world.

This is good (if vaguely mind-blowing) news. It means that we can directly change our experience of the world by changing the emotional layer of constructs that we slather all over our lives like hot butter on our breakfast toast.

It means that, like the US Marines, we can decide that pain is just weakness leaving the body.

It means that we can go out and buy a book that changes the way we model the world (or at least read more about such a book on Dave’s blog).


COMEDY / MEMOIR / HEALTH / FUCK

This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay (2017)

There are very few books that you think might change the prevailing political attitude to our public services, and even fewer that do so while being ALOLZ (‘Actually Laugh Out Loud’ – blame inflation).

Not so funny is the fact that Junior Doctor Adam Kay got so fucked off with the way the NHS was being treated by our politicians that he quit his job and become a stand-up comedian.

It’s a sorry state of affairs when ‘stand-up comedian’ is considered by anyone to be a more promising career than – well, almost anything – but certainly than being a doctor.

Please give this book to anyone who thinks that doctors are greedy selfish oafs or that the NHS should be replaced with Logan’s Run-style executions. Thanks.


PSYCHEDELICS

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan (2018)

Like John McPhee or Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Pollan is another one of those specialist-generalists who have done so much to popularise overlooked corners of our world.

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan shows us the vast spread of our psychedelic knowledge, from the natural history of the mushroom and the social history of the 1960s, through his own first psychedelic experiences undertaken as research for this book, to the modern renaissance of brain imaging and medical therapies.

Our doctors are desperate for new treatments for serious afflictions like depression and addiction, and, in combination with a global movement to ease restrictions on the use of other previously taboo compounds like marijuana, this feels like the start of a big decade for psychedelics.

This book is a good place to start if you want to make sure you’re on board before take-off.


Honourable mentions go to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The White Tiger by Aravinda Adiga (both fabulous fiction), Carpe Diem Regained by Roman Krznaric (on how to seize your days), The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman (anti-positive thinking) and Into The Woods by John Yorke (storytelling).

Further Reading

  1. Really interested in my reading? Feel free to peruse my Books of the Year from 2017.
  2. The Nine Best Books Ever Written in the English Language (2010).
  3. Also: visit a library. Before the internet we had books and it’s not been an upgrade, he emailed with zero sense of irony.

Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning

I read a lot of books. Not a ridiculous quantity, like my sister, but a lot. I also make a lot of spreadsheets. Not a ridiculous quantity, like my dad, but a lot. Putting those two aspects of my nature together, I can tell you things like:

  • I read an average of 32.7 books a year.
  • About a quarter of those will be fiction.
  • I also give up on an average of 6.9 books every year.
  • In the last 5 years, I have given 45 books a rating of 5 out of 5. That’s 27% of all the books I’ve read.
  • Only 1 book in 202 has scored 1 out of 5. Most of the books in this category I don’t finish, and therefore don’t score. This one I finished, and it was irritatingly bad. It was by Jeffrey Archer.

Every now and again I read a book that defies my rating scheme. If I was a different sort of person, a more devil-may-care sort of person, then I’d break my 5-point rating for books like this.

This week I read such a book, after finding out that Alastair Humphreys reads it every year: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Continue reading Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning

Dave’s Books of the Year 2017

This post is so sophisticated it should have its own Times Literary Supplement font. That’d distract you from the embarrassing fact that most of these are non-fiction. But hey – these seven books inspired me this year, each in their own way. Continue reading Dave’s Books of the Year 2017

The Mundane and the Sublime What library data says about the human condition

Today, I stumbled upon a list of the most common books stored in public libraries.

It strikes me, looking at the list, that these are our most precious books (in the Western tradition). These are the ones that have been chosen to be protected for eternity by our libraries.

As the list-makers say, these are “the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the ‘purchase vote’ of libraries around the globe.”

The data is from 2005, but I don’t think it will have changed much. Here’s the top ten:

  1. The Holy Bible
  2. US Census
  3. Mother Goose
  4. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  5. Odyssey by Homer
  6. Iliad by Homer
  7. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  8. Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Now, for comparison, here’s the top ten most loaned books from US libraries in 2009.

  1. Run for Your Life by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge
  2. Cross Country by James Patterson
  3. Finger Lickin’ Fifteen by Janet Evanovich
  4. The 8th Confession by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
  5. Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich
  6. Swimsuit by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
  7. The Shack by William P. Young
  8. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
  9. First Family by David Baldacci
  10. The Associate by John Grisham

Now you might feel a certain depression looking down this list.

But I like it: the two lists represent the beautiful dichotomy of our humanity.

They represent the two worlds we have to manage every day, the two worlds of the mundane and the sublime.

Only monks can spend all their time contemplating sublimity, the rest of us have spreadsheets and nappies and traffic jams to worry about.

But it’s nice to know that, when we need them, our libraries guarantee the wonders of literature.

Like Mother Goose.