Feral Reading

Returning to Myself in an Unplanned Summer

A Bookmobile from the 1960s.

When I was a kid, I suffered from miserable insomnia every summer. Though I also kicked at my thin nightgown and flipped like a beached fish in my hot room at home, my most tortured bouts were always at my grandparents’ farm in Maine, where I slept with my sisters in a stifling attic loft. We kept the window open, and the bright country stars stabbed at my eyes and cast the cluttered room in eerie light. Buzzing flies, whining mosquitos, and June bugs with rotary fan wings all hurled themselves into the screens, counterpoint to the John Cale screech of crickets that mirrored my mounting desperation at not being able to sleep.

But the primary cause of my sleeplessness wasn’t environmental. It was the books I read in Maine, all day, until my hands ached from holding the heavy hardbacks open and my back complained of hours contorted on the vinyl chaise lounge on the screened in porch. There I read anything I could get: Christie, Bradbury, Doyle, LeCarré, Tolkien, King, or any number of other writers whose names I’ve forgotten.

The Bookmobile drove down my grandparents’ country road once every two weeks, and I was always there to meet it with my sisters. We stepped into the creaky little van, bid hello to the friendly driver/librarian, and began our hunt. Ten minutes later, we carried our haul back up the driveway, always bagging the maximum number of books we were allowed. When we had finished our own books, we traded, and when those were gone, we resorted to the musty old books on my grandparents’ shelves. I even tried Tom Mix and Zane Gray, though I never finished one.

I have other memories of summer in Maine - weeding the garden, roaming the woods, the burn of pond water in my nose and throat when I cannonballed off the dock and dog paddled back to shore, and long sunset drives to the ice cream store in my grandparents’ boat of a car, the Queen Mary. But mostly what I did in Maine is lose myself in one book after another.

My mind felt invincible and light, free to travel at will. I could stalk London’s Victorian streets one day and ride a shaggy pony to Mordor the next, or spend the morning on a spaceship and the afternoon keeping Anne Frank company in her Amsterdam loft. But every night my poor, stiff body returned to earth in its sticky vinyl chair, feeling weak and tetchy and under-exercised.

At bedtime, I paid for it. My brain buzzed with stories, louder than the mosquitos, while my body twitched and thrashed with unspent energy. I went days with almost no sleep, and the only relief I could find for my malady was its cause - more reading, furtively, on the porch, where it was cool and I could barely make out the words by moonlight.

Anyway, the La Selva Beach summers are much cooler and less buggy. I have learned to exercise my body along with my brain by taking long walks to the library, where I only allow myself one book at a time. Slowly, after too many years of doomscrolling and scanning articles on my laptop, I am regaining the habit of losing myself in books for hours. And I feel more like myself than I have in ages.

Just now, I’m squinting at my screen because the low sun is preparing to set. I’m on my purple couch in the Questhouse, Damien working on a crossword puzzle beside me. The doors and windows are open, and it’s quiet. I meant to write this essay hours ago (and, as usual, my journal is full of drafts I never finished in the two weeks since I wrote you last) but I didn’t because I’m halfway through Pachenko by Min Jin Lee, and I’m desperate to finish it. (True confession: I also begged off a party I really wanted to attend so that I could read all day and procrastinate on this essay until now, when the party is happening.) I could only entice myself out of our upstairs bedroom, which has become my reading lair of choice, because I wanted to tell you about how great the book is. Before that, I read Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, which was not fun or light at all, but it made me think.

This kind of crazy quilt thinking - building an understanding of the world through the haphazard stitching together of books in my brain - is what I missed most about being a feral reader. This is no systematic course of study I’m undertaking. I didn’t set out to learn about 20th century Korea and Japan, or the rise of global Neoliberalism, or ghosts in the New England woods before that. (The book before Invisible Doctrine was The North Woods, which I adored.) I read what I feel like, and if I don’t like it, I put it down and find something I do like.

Certainly, a lifetime of reading has offered me far more context than I had as a twelve year old, but I have regained that old wayfinder spirit. The reading I did in the intervening decades between my teens and my fifties often felt more purposeful but less fun. Of course I read for pleasure, but not as widely or as freely. I was an English teacher for twenty five of those years, so I often chose books in preparation for teaching, and I read with a teacher’s critical eye.

Since the advent of laptops and high-speed internet, I have spent far too many hours indulging my addiction to stories with what passes for news - so much clickbait and fear-mongering, and spitballing and pontificating, which has gotten worse now that the election is close and we’re all afraid of catastrophe. But those stories don’t give me what books do - deep empathy for characters whose worlds I inhabit for a time. Instead, modern, algorithm-curated news narrows my perspective and makes me fearful and angry, not emotions conducive to imagination or empathy.

I know that I’m a grownup, and I have to face the news. I also have to exercise my creaky body as well as my hungry brain, and I have to fulfill grown up responsibilities such as feeding the cats and washing the dirty clothes and writing essays every two weeks. (I am giggling at the simplicity of this list, which doesn’t feel particularly grown up at all.) But, having found my way back to feral reading, I’m not going to give it up again. It feels too good. If I sometimes struggle to fall asleep on a July night, when the stars are bright and I can’t stop thinking about the story I’m reading, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.