Whatshot
Reader's block
Reader's block
Date: 2025-12-18
As a child, I lapped up books, from Austen to Tolstoy, 'in the belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light' (Geoff Dyer). Through university, on and on it went, page after page. Book after book, different languages, different ages. Until I suddenly experienced the block. Writers know this feeling well, a kind of stultifying emptiness. The blankness I sometimes get when trying to write this column!!
In the age of scroll, not parchment but screen, unable to concentrate on anything for more than 10 minutes, I suddenly couldn't find anything I wanted to read. I felt lost, flailing around like the proverbial mad hatter. My whole life had been about books. It still was, running a bookshop. But the pages somehow eluded me. Made worse by living with a partner who reads everything! I was a literary reading failure.
Then, a couple of years ago, health issues forced me to reassess. Suddenly, the imaginative doors of heaven opened again and I was back in, a book a week, searching for the next one before I had even finished the last. I felt like Lewis Carroll,s Alice
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a steep well... and into a wonderland of non-sense. It was a headrush, so beautiful, so fast while I was so slow.
The holiday season is here.
People come into the bookshop and say 'what can I read, I need to catch up'. Why must we read to catch up? We read books to go backwards into the present. To slow down. To a standstill. I want to tell them that my year of slower reading has been wonderful. It is still possible to turn your phone off, recapture the silent world and regain the beauty of words. The longer your life, the more you can be ignited by them. As one of the characters in Javier Marais', The Infatuations tells us, 'Once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.'
Don't be a blockhead/ Feed the brain in its stead/ your imagination will spread/ in the sun like butter bread.
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