I'd like to comment...on "subtle" reading

Not long ago, I made a trip over to Frostburg, Maryland to meet up with a friend at an excellent little cafe called Clatter. My friend was interested in doing some creative writing, and we had a marvelous conversation on the writing life.

Please excuse my vagueness, as I don’t know if this friend has made writing intentions widely known, and I want to protect confidences.

Of course talk of writing always includes talk of reading, and the delightfulness of meeting up at Clatter was compounded by a visit to one of my favorite indie bookstores, Main Street Books. It’s the kind of place made for browsing, and it never fails that I walk out of there with more than one book I didn’t know I needed to read.

I found three books on this recent visit to Main Street Books: The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence (edited by John Brehm), At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (by Fenton Johnson), and How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell). As I was checking out, the owner (or, at least an employee, but he seemed like the owner) looked at each book.

“You are a very subtle reader,” he said.

“I like a quiet book,” I said, and he nodded in agreement.

What a splendid interaction!

What does it mean to be a subtle reader? In a world that is full of productivity measurements, where we place inordinate value on doing more and more for less and less, where our self-worth is often correlated to some kind of continuum of production, I feel like investing my time in slow, quiet, subtle reading is my surest form of resistence. I long to get lost in a well-wrought sentence. To read something of beauty and elegance, of intellectual and emotional heft. As Brehm wrote in the intro to the collected poems, reverence comes from the Latin reverentia, “literally to stand in awe of.” He then continues, writing that the idea of reverence “has not been forgotten so much as banished, since it is incompatible with the foundational assumptions of our increasingly technological culture: the reductive, mechanistic, radically materialist worldview that is so thoroughly interwoven into all aspects of our lives we’re hardly aware of it.”

What happens when, in fact, we become aware? Can we shed, even temporarily, the increasingly reductive, mechanistic, and radically materialist?

My email inboxes might come to a different conclusion than I would. But, I don’t have a ready answer for these questions. Yet I believe that my subtle reading, if not an answer directly, is a way to subvert these qualities that continue to batter our modern lives. For, as Johnson wrote, “…there is a loneliness that arises from our capitalist, consumerist, addictive, wired society.” Being alone with these books achieves a richer solitude, and, where the wired society leaves one tired, disconnected, and lonely, after reading my subtle books I feel a deeper connection to the natural world, to the inner world, and to those around me.

Ah, irony.

Because I have been taking my time to savor these books, I’ve not yet opened the Odell. I realized that as I’m bombarded with lists of the best, or the most, or the otherwise optimized and curated list that signifies 2024, or the most anticipated of 2025, or worse, those upcmoing resolutions of the new year’s variety.

Just. Stop.

This year, I invite you to join me in the act of subtle reading. The kind you do with books that require that you re-read sentences, or whole paragraphs, more than once, with pen in hand, marking, making notes, or without pen, just letting it wash over you again, again, again. Without deference to how much we read, perhaps attention to how well we read, both in the act of reading and in the material we choose to read.

In fact, so many of the books I’ve written about in “I’d like to comment…” have included subtle books: The Night the Rain Had Nowhere To Go (William Woolfit), Take Me Home (Bethany Jarmul), and Home Movies (Michael Wheaton) could all be classified in that subtle category. As do many of the books I’ve written about in my work for Synapsis.

My list for my year of subtle reading includes the not yet read How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and includes Eyes Moving Through The Dark: Essays (William Woolfit). I am sure to post many others in the coming months. And should you like to join me in these particular titles, well, what better joy than that? I’d love to know if you want to share, and also respect any wish to keep the contemplative in one’s own sphere.

But I would wish, for you, for me, for any of us just tired by our current circumstance, to find that sublime place, away from the rush of a culture accelerating to oblivion. Stillness in a dance is just as important as any movement. A lesson from my past self to my current self. Perhaps, also a lesson that can be useful to you.

News and Notes

• I made several nomination this year for the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards, including Softie (Megan Howell) for the John Leonard Prize for a first book, I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me (Matthew Ferrence) for nonfiction, the Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (William Woolfit) for poetry, and Negative Girl (Libby Cudmore) for Fiction.

• Another wonderful subtle read is David B. Prather’s We Were Birds, a truly wonderful collection of poems. If you get it, one of my favorites was “Mea Culpa.”

• I’ve been sipping a lovely seasonal tea: Silent Night.

• If you want a fun holiday read, or a gift idea for the young dancer in your life, consider Lauren in the Limelight (Miriam Landis). Also, here’s a fun take on the classic “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” with a jazzy heart.

• Finally, for Morgantown friends, check out Monkey Wrench Books downtown for fun gift ideas. Books are often the gifts that really do last a lifetime. Grab a coffee while you are there!