Go read a damn book

Postcard #36

a park in Ise / Japan, 2025

Dear friend,

This is your regular reminder to read. I give you full permission to just stop here and pick up a book instead.

I have always been a big reader, but I go through different phases. I realised recently that I had been struggling to finish a nonfiction book for the past year, and couldn’t quite place why. When I speak of nonfiction here I’m generally referring to books that require extensive research to publish; closer to science / critical social analysis than memoir / personal essay. I’m sure there were several factors, but the one that ultimately motivated me to start reading nonfic again was when I realised I was getting all of my nonfiction through social media - Instagram and Substack. This was largely in the form of articles, essays, and news, much of which likely hadn’t been seen (much less edited) by another person before posting. These platforms also tend to highlight personal writing, so I found myself reading a lot of ‘articles’ that were really just personal rants on certain topics with questionable evidence to show for it.

Because I was reading so much online, I was struggling to read things that were more in depth, researched, and honestly? More boring. I found myself reaching a certain apathy with what I was reading online, only the problem wasn’t that I was reading the wrong articles (though there was a bit of that as well), but rather that I was looking in the wrong place. What I was looking for could be found quite easily in a section of my reading that I’d been sorely neglecting: nonfiction. Reading a book is more boring. But it is also significantly more rewarding.

Some of my favourite books are nonfiction. Braiding Sweetgrass, How to Change Your Mind, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Four Thousand Weeks - all of these books have had a profound impact on the way I live my life. Yet somehow I had convinced myself that all of the critical reading I needed to do could be found online, in shorter content.

I’m not trying to say that online content cannot be rewarding, or that those who write online are doing lesser work. What I’m saying is do not stop reading books. Especially if you loved to read growing up but have been struggling to find the time/attention span as an adult. There are things in books that no online article or longform TikTok video will ever be able to teach you, and the key reason for that is time. Reading a book forces you to interrogate a certain area for several weeks or months, depending on your reading speed. You might learn all the same key facts in a YouTube video, but that video will likely go out of your head as soon as you’ve heard it. The fact that you’re picking up a book and reading consistently will serve as a regular affirmation to yourself that you are actively following your curiosity and your desire to learn and grow, and I imagine that having to recall the different things you’ve learned over the course of the book helps to store your reading into further long-term memory.

I’m currently reading No is Not Enough by Naomi Klein. It talks about Trump’s shock politics back in 2016, and outlines the likely disastrous impact of his policies whilst also highlighting several key ways we can resist his tactics. I’ve been reading a lot of articles online following Trumps’ re-election, but it is this book that has really given me the depth to understand Trump as a figure, and the precarity of the times we are living in. Would highly recommend. Next on my nonfiction list are Love in Exile by Shon Faye, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing, and Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake.

Dear friend, if none of this has motivated you so far, I will leave you with something I said to a friend earlier this week who was struggling to read: it is in the interest of the powerful that the public do not read critically. A critically aware public, one that is aware of its rights and can strip away the government/legal/scientific jargon to understand a situation, can equip themselves with the necessary tools to rebalance society that empowers the majority. In times where we feel helpless and powerless, books are the very thing we should be turning to as one of the key resources we have in finding solutions and the hope to continue resisting.

Our attention is a resource, and it is a resource that can be mined by others for data & profit; a resource that diminishes into ignorance. Or it can be a resource that we nourish, that we take care of, and that feeds us with the learnings we need to continue to grow.

I’d love to hear about any books you’re reading at the moment, or would like to recommend!

Lots of love,

Vee

P.S. I have to acknowledge the irony of writing against online writing, online. This is exactly the kind of unedited, unresearched stuff I was talking about … welp!