Alberta Review: Contradictions of Reading
Reading is a deeply personal act, but is shaped by external factors
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Alberta Review has been many things over the years. Occasionally that has included articles more in line with the name—a review. That’s getting harder to do consistently because, over the last few years, what I read and how I read has changed dramatically. It’s revealed a odd contradiction when it comes to reading.
Reading is intensely personal and insular. It is the ultimate form of self-thought, and truly engaging with a written work requires solitude and introspection. It requires “deep literacy.”
“Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.”
Reading—and the deeply insular act of reading—is essential for freedom. Hannah Arendt, the best philosopher to contemplate the nature of evil and political totalitarianism, believed that while we are social beings and our actions are social, for our thoughts and judgements to be just and moral, we must retreat from the world to develop them. In the Banality of Evil and subsequent writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she observed that his evil was caused by the evil of not thinking. Once confronted with the reality of a changed world with changed morals, he just as readily accepted that what he did was wrong as he had accepted the actions as just in the moment. He had no internal engagement with anything, so it was easy to fall into evil deeds.
Adolf Eichmann and the Banality of Evil is a pretty heavy topic to introduce a broader and, dare I say, banal idea—reading is deeply internal. However, the contradiction with reading is that what we read and how we read is shaped so much by our external environment. And that’s why it’s been so hard to create a true review-focused newsletter. There was a time when I was just out of graduate school when I continued the reading habits I cultivated there: heady and topical non-fiction books, which allowed me to dig deeper into a topic or read seriously about one I’ve no experience in but a general curiosity. They were books about war, history, politics, sociology, and psychology.
However, once I entered the workforce, I realized how much my day-to-day life determined what I read. While working in politics, especially on campaigns, I began to read more on psychology as it pertains to voting (especially get-out-the-vote operations), political memoirs from campaign staffers, and books about the populist moment on the right or progressive overreach so that I could think more deeply about how to interact with these movements and attract more voters to our cause. This meant a lot of books, a few long-form essays or academic articles, but fewer news stories.
My current job is still in politics, just adjacent to it. Working in government relations requires knowing many different things about many different industries, in addition to the day-to-day political machinations and changes in the industry itself (which requires knowing things about marketing, communications, media, and especially social media). This means I read a lot of news articles and shorter pieces throughout the day, especially in the mornings.
Keeping current is hard work. It also saps the brain of its energy. And so gone are the days of reading non-fiction for me. Age, I think, has also contributed to the death of my desire to read non-fiction. I’ve become more experienced in how people write and present arguments—especially in the fields I’m likely to read about. Reading a book review or the first and last few pages usually allows me to intuit the argument and the rationale. Many of my friends can (and should) mock me for that, and I’m sure I’m missing a few gems by ignoring the meat of a book, but with little brain power left after a day of micro-reading, it is the best I’ve got.
And so, I’m left with reading fiction and, at least over the last year, focusing on sci-fi books. There’s value in that, as I’ve written before. The literary novel, especially, has traditionally been the home of the most profound truths of human suffering and flourishing. We seek to be heroes in real life because of the exaggerated and unrealistic heroism of Robert Jordan in a fictionalized one. But, as literary works become more navel-gazey and more and more focused on bespoke social beliefs rather than the broader human experience, sci-fi has, to me at least, kept a more broad view of the human experience and how human nature changes and, more importantly, stays the same, regardless of the setting.
And so, I’ve found the external world—in this case, my career, my growth in experience, and publishing trends—determining my reading habits, imposing themselves on a deeply personal and internal act.
Society also shapes not just what we read but also our ability and desire to read. TikTok is the biggest monster in a stable of evils that has sapped attention spans and degraded reading ability. Last week, an Atlantic articlecaused a minor stir as it detailed university professors at elite U.S. schools confronting the reality that students can’t read books anymore; their attention spans are too short, and the expectations from their past too low. This is a big topic, likely for another day, but it is a data point in showing how so many things are out of our control, for good and for ill.
Fortunately, reading is one way to take control. It’s a deeply personal and internalized state of being. The dialectic one has with a book inside one's head is an example of extreme agency. But, like all profound and important things, there’s a contradiction at work (the greed of capitalism that drives the greater good the system produces, for example). It’s neither good nor bad. Just there.
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