The Patreon Letter - 17th November, 2018

I can't believe the year is almost over. I have to go shopping for the last of the groceries for Thanksgiving later today, and that means next weekend I'll be putting up the Christmas tree, and where does the time go? It seems like just last week I was lying around suffering in the summer heat and now it's cold all the time again. It just snuck up on me this year, I guess.

I feel like as much as I never want to actually go outside a lot of my habits are seasonal. Now that it's cold, I'm starting to bunker back down with video games under a heavy blanket. But for the last three or four months, I've been much more likely to reach for a book to enjoy while having some tea or sitting in front of a fan. Screens are just too much sometimes, especially in the late summer and fall. 

Which is to say this is a letter about reading and books. I've been enjoying getting back into reading book books (as opposed to the mountain of manga I read a while back) recently but I've found it came with a lot of anxieties that I felt worth enumerating, because we all live in this hellscape and sharing is how you name and defeat your demons. And boy, do I have some reading demons. 

Let's start at the end and work backwards, and the amount this anxiety is all of a type will become very clear very quickly: I love reading but it's hard not to think of it as 'wasted time' given my life in 2018. I don't have a podcast about books. I don't write reviews or crit on books. I don't even really have a space on twitter to talk about books. If I want to share a bunch of panels of comics, that'll get some replies and do some numbers, but book tweets and feelings are more or less shouted into the void. 

This shouldn't be discouraging, of course, because I'm adult who can do what I like without worrying about metrics attached to all my activity. But also I absolutely cannot do that, because who can when you live and work on the internet? Every book I read a few nights where I didn't play a game or watch some anime, things that get turned into our two most popular podcasts. It means that the chores associated with a network probably get neglected a little while longer. These letters come out more last minute and I'm left with subjects like my dumb anxiety around reading books instead of screencapping Pokemon Let's Go! Eevee (though I'm also totally doing that, fwiw, follow me on twitter). 

 And this is absolutely the same stupid problem with Capitalism insisting we turn all our endeavors into professionalized structures with metrics attached to them. Can't just do shit for ourselves ever without draping it in anxiety. I recognize that. It's been the driving reality of the last five years of my life. Unfortunately recognizing it means jack shit when it comes to defeating it. The more responsibilities I take on with a family to take care of, the harder that drive is to ignore, because while it is brain poison it's also the very real game we all live and die under. On some level, we ignore it at our peril. 

So let's go one layer in. While I'm reading it is an eternal war not to check twitter, which is in part just us all fighting against the way the internet has destroyed our patience and attention, but it also means that I'm constantly considering whether something I'm reading can be excerpted into a good screenshot for my feed. Maybe I can convince someone that what I'm reading is good and thus I am a smartypants worth respect! 

Just screenshotting books has its own quality of performative posturing.

Maybe I'm projecting, but is it projecting when I'm doing it to my own life?

But also I read a lot of books on kindle and that comes with this feature where you can see what were popular highlighted passages, so you can learn what constitutes good quotes for the average person reading this book. Which is cool, I like that a lot actually. It has in some ways sharpened my ability to spot when the book steps outside itself to offer something a little more writerly, a thing I used to scuttle books by doing too often when I wrote books. 

It's also the absolute worst because when I see a popular highlight my brain goes 'well whatever I do I can't highlight that' because what if I'm just another droll reader making the most obvious picks? I'm mortified just thinking about it, and then mortified on top of it that I'm so snobby about something as trivial as 'what part of a book do you like'? But again it feeds into the sense of popularity contest, of turning the act of reading into content. If I got numbers off of sharing the popular highlights, then I'm just going for easy hits. I might as well be making memes or something. What a stupid way to think and be. 

Let's go one more layer out, to the picking of books in general. I read pretty widely as opposed to deeply, which I don't actually have much anxiety about, but it does mean I waffle for ages about what to read next. 

Do I read this book on World War I i've had sitting around for years since it's been coming up lately with the centennial? 

Do I read this book of poetry as a way to enrich myself? 

What about the used books I snapped up because they were a deal without really knowing if I wanted them. 

Oh, you know what, I'm not very well read in scifi, I should read more. But do I read the classics to fill in my context even if I might not be enthused about them? Or do I just look for popular well regarded modern sci fi that is often more my speed, even if it means less important reads with far less 'education' to them? Why do I even care about being well read in this genre, again?

And shit, the National Book Award winners were announced like three days ago. I wanted to read the entire longlists, not just the winners, but that's already five books who won that I probably won't get to. Should I even try? Or just forget about the whole thing? 

Oh it's been three weeks, time for another Star Trek book. These aren't great but at least it puts off making a 'real' book decision for another week, because we have these planned out far far in advance. 

Needless to say, all of this is fraught with the most negative energy. It's amazing I read as much as I do when I think about the mess involved with the process, but I do what I can to keep up a steady habit. I feel like I'd worry less about my picks for reading if I read more, because each individual choice would mean less. But also I read like 50-75 books a year (more if I get on a serious comics tear) so it's not like I don't read a lot. 

The solution remains elusive and the brain remains defective, as ever.

I have no solution to this, obviously, other than to just shut up sometimes and do the thing despite all this. Seeing it all laid out like this makes it sound so much more debilitating than it is in practice, but I think that's true of everyone with Online Capitalism Issues so I feel okay just admitting that all of this is true but it's more like a constant irritant than a huge stumbling block. It just exists, and I have to deal with it, and if you also have to deal with something like this know you're not alone and we can all do whatever we want together. 

Also be my friend on goodreads. 

Until next time,

Em