How To Simultaneously Be On The Internet And Read All The Books And Achieve Great Success And Wealth By Telling People How To Live
A Piece That's Not Really About Any Of That
I am feeling kind of f***ing cheated right now, and I wonder if others in my position are feeling the same. When I started regularly reading books, at the end of my misspent teens, it was my understanding that I would from that point on have instant recall of the details from every one that I read: character names, ideas, memorable phrases, plot, at my fingertips, all there, any time I wanted. Now, almost three decades on, as a self-educating person who can finally factually say he has read Quite A Few Books, I find the case to be, if anything, the opposite to what I suspected as a young man. What happened in the huge literary novel I lost myself in during the final days of the year 2000 under the duvet in my freezing south London bedsit and still consider to be one of my happiest experiences as a reader? Or in the life-changing experimental memoir I read in the summer of 2009 in the Norfolk countryside? I could barely say, in all honesty. Certainly couldn’t summarise it for you in any pithy way or spontaneously isolate an archetypal passage or sentence for you on request. Yet still I persevere, filling my time by reading even more of these damn books, when I could be doing something more technically useful.
I would not, of course, have it any other way. I know there are gargantuobrained individuals who can recite passages from their favourite books at will, engage in crisp ideological arguments with their peers about novels they read eight and a half years ago. I am not one of them, and I’m fine with that. I have enormous faith in reading books - more than I ever have - and in the way they linger inside me and make their subtle tweaks and alterations of me. It’s never been about showing the world what you’ve read or reading it to take part in an intellectual pissing contest. It’s about something more magical and private and powerful. You know it’s in there, but you can’t always express precisely how. And that in itself makes it even more magical and private and powerful. I don’t have to be able to have recall of a single sentence of any cherished book to be aware of the enigmatic way it’s changed me, even if I can’t always easily spontaneously summarise the alchemy of that. It’s also deeply connected with my growing faith in continuing to write books: I love the abstract stew that the books I’ve read gradually combine to create with my own experiences, disappointments, hopes, human encounters, fears, passions. I love that with every new book it gets richer, makes the experience of writing richer, more of a multilayered conversation. The conversation finally becomes so addictive - especially the complex understanding of history and human nature that blossoms from it - that there’s no other way to exist, and the gnawing frustration of how few hours there are in the day and how many great books there are out there to read and be ineffably altered by becomes a malady to live by.
At the end of 2023, the same year I permanently deleted my Twitter account, I noticed that - as a slow reader - I had managed to get through more than 70 books, including several in audio form. I don’t think I’ve read that many in one twelve-month period since 2008, the year before I signed up to Twitter. All these statistics are undoubtedly connected. I now look at my increasingly algorithm-subjugated Instagram account - all that remains of my social media, ignoring an essentially dormant Facebook account - and think, every day, “Why bother?” Writing interests me. Reading interests me. Being out in the world interests me. I don’t especially mind Instagram or feel it has any negative hold on me, but browsing it does not interest me. It’s not as if it’s even significantly influential in terms of book sales any more. When my new novel comes out this summer, how many more copies of it will I sell due to still being on Instagram and having 34.1k followers who never see what I post? 26? 12? If that? Social media has long been a useful way for writers to reach readers but it’s also more dominantly a way for writers to reach people with attention spans like grated parmesan who are too psychically oppressed by social media to read books any more. Substack, of course, now has its Notes section, which has some similarities to Twitter - mostly in the sense that it sometimes feels like Twitter might have felt if it was populated by people who’d genuinely read what they said they’d read and weren’t constantly furious about everything - but I love that, for now at least, its driving engine is substance, that it’s centrally about writing rather than distraction and noise. Books are the real business: what is thrashed out and explored in them is what will stand when all this is over. Substack largely seems in support of them, rather than an annoying distraction from them or a downright insult to them, as - for so long - all other social media has seemed to me.
Recently I had cause to go back through a lot of the photos I took during the second decade of this century. What you’d see, if you looked at them, is a record of the life of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors, walking in peaceful and beautiful places - plus a few ugly ones, because inclusivity is important - swimming in rivers and the sea, attending horticultural courses and linoprint workshops and campanology lessons and expeditions to meet rare bees and rewilded beavers. All of this happened and was hugely enjoyed. But beneath it hides a parallel unseeable truth: the person who, while he does all this, has come, insidiously, since he first slightly reluctantly took possession of a smartphone, to see that smartphone as a pocket tyrant, a controlling bestower of fortune, good and bad, to be feared and obeyed. I checked it way too often, weakly excusing myself with the fact that I knew plenty of people who checked theirs far more often. I think I had always known, on some level, that the most meaningful and richly creative period of my life would not commence until my middle years but, now those years had started, and I was finally writing the books I had always wanted to write, there was an awareness that they could be even more meaningful and richly creative, if not for the goddamn internet with all its demands and flaky enticements. This awareness felt a little like the ticks that I sometimes found gorging on my blood supply in summer after I’d walked through long grass. The difference being that I’d always been able to remove the ticks, even the one that, after an especially unfortunate outing in 2016, I found deep inside my left nipple.
“Why do I persist in polluting my eyes by looking at this?” I’d think, checking my phone or laptop and seeing the shouted opinions of people enormously keen to show other people how well-read and knowledgeable and correct they were, then wondering where on earth they found the time to become so well-read and knowledgeable when they were on Twitter arguing with strangers all the time. I began to get headaches from the thought of messages I’d not replied to, couldn’t humanly reply to and stay sane, strewn across apps like slug trails through a house with an impractically large number of rooms whose owner had left the front door ajar overnight. At the same time, I collapsed into bed at night with my writing energy sapped by the messages I had replied to. In the cabin where I lived on the fringe of Dartmoor - which in fact did not have a lock on its front door - I had a dream about an unbroken line of strangers, stretching way off to the heathery horizon, filing into the building. From around 2017, I experienced a curious transference: a growing need to declutter my domestic space, sometimes escalating into an exasperated desire to live wholly without possessions of any sort, yet when I examined the physical space where I lived, I saw little clutter, not much that struck me as excessively materialistic, and I liked the possessions I had. I feel sure I was not unique in most of these sensations, as someone on social media; the difference perhaps being that I had a few more practical reasons to feel tied to it than some, due to the ways in which it had allowed me to forge more creative freedom for myself (while also conversely, infuriatingly, stifling some of that same freedom). Many of us had undergone the realisation several years ago that nobody is going to end up on their death bed saying “You know what, I am SO GLAD I spent so much time on Facebook and Twitter!” but disentangling yourself from it when your livelihood has become to some extent dependent on it is easier said than done, especially with all the clever modifications it is constantly making to make us willing slaves in its mission to destroy humanity.
On the whole, I tend not to write pieces on the internet about the internet. I feel like more than enough of them already exist. Most of them are called things like “SIX SUREFIRE INBOXING TRUTH HACKS WHICH WILL HELP YOU BE A PERSON” and they’re not my area. Also, I’m not massively interested in being a person. If anything, I’m more interested in being some kind of part wolf, part man, part owl hybrid that you might find reclining high in the mossy branches of a tree above a granite gorge reading a novel written in the 1940s about witchcraft and noncommunicative husbands by someone called Margaret or Sylvia who was unusually good at gardening. But I do still go on the internet - and will probably continue to, to some extent, until it finally explodes, around autumn 2037 - and it feels like a shift is happening right now, and perhaps not just to me, and I wanted to chronicle it, in some fashion, and thought I might as well do it here. There have been pieces recently, on this very site, about the way that the era that stretches from approximately 2007 to the height of pandemic cabin fever is already starting to seem like a freak anomalous phase in human discourse and will soon seem far more so. It’s as if you can already hear the conversations taking place a couple of years from now, ricocheting back to us: “Do you remember when people on Twitter responded like somebody was genuinely about to take their own life if that person announced they were deleting their Twitter account? Can you believe being a human actually used to be like that, in 2019?” If deleting the ostensible career security blanket whose thread count was 80 something thousand Twitter followers - followers I’d worked hard to accrue over many years - last summer felt brave, I am aware that behind that bravery were some usefully bolstering cultural circumstances. For one, the existence of Substack and the people who already subscribed to my writing on it. For another, the general feeling - stretching back long before the Elon Musk era - of many people that Twitter is a sickness they’d prefer vanquished from their lives and that social media, as we knew it during this century’s adolescence, would be over, and at the very least something to sensibly take three or four steps back from.
It’s good to have your opinions and beliefs challenged and I like the way carefully considered long form writing frequently does that to mine. But it’s also sometimes nice to find out that something you strongly sensed was fact, for a long time, but which the social conventions of the time were rendering a bit muzzy and making you shy away from finding out firsthand, was just as true you as you believed, maybe even more so. Directly after I deleted The Website People Still Mostly Refuse Not To Call Twitter last summer I wrote the final chunk of a novel in a hurtling state of flow that I know was more involved and artistically rewarding than it would have been if I’d still been using social media in the way I used to. What’s no less gratifying is what’s happened to my reading habits since then. As strong as my yearning to write is, it never smothers my yearning to read. More often than not, the latter yearning leads and the other follows, eagerly eating its dust. To begin to satisfy that yearning again, properly, feels like coming home after a period of being half away. It’s not a race. The numbers - it’s just conceivable that I might end up having read a total of nine books this month, but, if not, fine - are only important in the sense that they mean more of those mindstretching conversations that books are, more layers of discussion with wise new (albeit often deceased) people, more of the antidote to seeing avatars yell themselves hoarse, without nuance, as if solely to seek confirmation they might be alive. Because other people who read this newsletter and also like those kind of conversations sometimes ask me for recommendations, here are a few of the recent ones that I’ve enjoyed most:
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
An Encyclopaedia Of Myself by Jonathan Meades
Eyewitness 1900-1949 by Joanna Bourke
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Ironweed by William Kennedy
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
That’s quite a variety to take in, especially for someone with a brain as small and parochially formed as mine: medieval Fenland nuns, a boyhood in 1950s Wiltshire, a dizzying spectrum of early 20th Century social history, literary hobnobbing and Trotskyism and life on the frontline of political journalism, a visceral account of New York homelessness, deceptively ordinary lives in rural Canada, Indiana and Florida spanning almost of the whole of the 1900s. But somehow, when it’s books, unlike social media, it never feels too much. It feels peaceful. It feels calm. It doesn’t give me dreams about hoards of strangers breaking into my house or make me want to take a family heirloom to a charity shop.
I find, as it continues, that I am no longer quite as envious of the 25-year-old who, under the bedcovers, in a room that just wouldn’t warm up, where due to space constraints only about four square inches of floor remained hooverable, where the big distraction of the time was not Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or WhatsApp or TikTok or even Myspace but a still quite new and mysterious email account, devoured that big character-driven novel, so lost in it that all his worries, and even the weather itself, faded away. Yesterday, albeit in cosier circumstances, I found myself no less lost in or delighted by The Stone Diaries, my-far-too-late introduction to the work of the literary magician Carol Shields. I read it directly after Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, which I also found generous and addictive, but not in the same league, not nearly as quietly clever at unfurling a narrative or telling the reader about the lives and thoughts and desires of women and men in the 20th Century or telling me about unfortunate events in a warm way or other things that made me go “Wow - I was not expecting that!” (which I realise isn’t Franzen’s job, specifically, but then maybe in fact it is).
I once went for a drink with a guy who looked at his phone, non-stop, for the whole two hours the pair of us were in the pub. I initially assumed it was to do with my conversation or an off-putting pus-filled lesion that had, without me realising, appeared on my face, but it turned out that he just found Facebook that amazingly interesting. It’s doubtful any fully clothed person could have competed with Facebook on the night. Perhaps I’m not much better when it comes to books. I’m always thinking, when faced with any invite or obligation, “How much is this going to cut into my reading time?” 'I’ve never attempted to simultaneously read a book and have a conversation with someone in a pub, but I’ve prioritised books over a lot of things: parties, things I’m supposed to do to make my own books sell more that would probably seem quite attractive to a lot of people, a root canal treatment, my car’s engine, the digital nurturing of friendships. It’s happened. Will continue to. Maybe even more, if recent events are anything to go by.
I misbehaved while I was reading The Stone Diaries. I should have been writing my own novel - the third, which has to be finished in what I would consider a scarily short amount of time, if social media still had any pull on me - but I carried on reading, couldn’t leave Carol Shields and her precise and lovely and unpredictable use of words alone. I knew my boss - who I am now increasingly coming to realise is me, rather than some weird unhealthy combination of me and the internet - would not be happy, but also that he would, because reading a brilliant book makes him as happy as just about anything else he can do. We worked it out in a tranquil fashion, in his office. Nobody raised their voice or wilfully misunderstood anybody due to their compromised attention span. My boss told me that I could have written 2000 words of my own in the time it took me to read those last 200 pages. I told him, yeah, but it was better than dicking about on social media or reading some tips elsewhere on the internet about how to be a great writer really quickly without doing years of struggling and failing and reading and living and writing. He agreed but pointed out that the book didn’t seem much like anything that could be clearly categorised as research reading. I told him all reading is research reading, in a way, especially if it’s good fulfilling reading that you can feel changing you in numerous tiny ways. He asked me to quote some passages from the book and very clearly outline the plot, from start to finish. I told him this was unfair because he knew that was a weak spot for me, and those specific details were already fading from my memory, it being several hours since I finished The Stone Diaries, and the important thing was that I could already feel it burrowing down inside me forever, adding to that abstract stew, maybe not making me “better”, as such, but enriching me, challenging me, titling my vision a little. I also told him that it had taught me the word “muzzy”, which I was planning to use at the earliest possible opportunity, probably even tomorrow, on Substack. He appeared to accept all this. Then we had a drink and turned our attention to the all-important question of what to read next.
My latest novel is Villager. My second one is 1983, published in summer, and you can support it here by ordering a signed first edition, if you’d like to. My third one is being written right now. I’ll tell you more about it very soon.
Another great piece as always, Tom. I really don't use social media at all anymore, and haven't for a few years. It was amazing... I quit social media, worried that I would be out of touch with the world and everyone I knew. Instead I got my bachelor's degree, made many new friends as well as forming deeper connections with existing ones, went on some amazing hikes, and read some amazing books. But I've noticed recently that social media, or the design of social media, is creeping into everything. Like just not being on social platforms is not enough distance anymore. It's there when I check the news, or look up a recipe, or watch a gardening video online. Avatars yelling themselves hoarse, as you said. Are you finding that as well? If so, how do you deal with it; just stay off the internet altogether?
Book recommendations are very inconvenient because I can’t resist buying recommended books 😬