Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Love Reading Again.

I finished a book this week – the second one I’ve read all the way through this year.

I know that doesn’t sound very impressive. Frankly, it isn’t. It wasn’t even a particularly long book – only around 300 pages. But when I reached the final page and gently shut the cover I had the most profound feeling of satisfaction, like cracking the knuckles of my soul (sorry, Dad, I know you hate it when I do that).

God, I’ve missed reading.

To misquote John Green, I stopped reading the same way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. I blame the pandemic for this, as I do most of my current problems. Before the lockdowns began, when I still lived in London, my commute was fairly straightforward: just one 30-minute trip on the Overground, from Forest Hill all the way to the train’s terminus at Highbury & Islington.

Crammed in though I was among the huddled masses yearning to breathe something other than body odour, I found it incredibly easy to lose myself in whatever book was jammed into my bag. I became a master of turning the pages on a hardback cover with just my thumb, holding awkwardly onto a pole or shuffling down the carriage like a literate penguin to make room for the deluge of new passengers shoving their way on at Shadwell.

On average, I finished one book every 10 days, or about three dozen per year. Not hugely impressive, I know, but not bad either. And then, one fateful day in March 2020, the world ground to a halt.

Suddenly my ‘commute’ consisted only of the dozen paces between my bedroom and my living room. I tried recreating the Overground experience by awkwardly leaning against the living room window, but it just wasn’t the same. The lunch breaks I often spent sneaking in an extra chapter at my desk became the time when I snuck in a walk around the park with my wife.

Eventually, I even stopped reaching for my book in the evenings before bed; preferring to while away the evenings by turning on the PlayStation. Games are interactive, and by playing them I wasn’t just getting lost in a good story. I was tricking my brain into believing that I was doing something productive, something useful. It worked, for a little while.

I tried a few times to get back into the swing of reading, without any real success. After a few dozen pages I would feel my attention beginning to wander, my willpower beginning to drain. I was genuinely scared that my love of literature had begun to atrophy like the unused limbs of a person in a coma. Writing this, I realise that the satisfaction I mentioned earlier was also tinged with relief; like looking down and realising that I can, in fact, still wiggle my toes.

Being back at work has helped: I no longer have to rely on public transport to get me to the office (and frankly I’m grateful for the chance to stretch my legs after so long cooped up indoors), but picking up a book at lunchtime feels wonderfully decadent – especially when I get so lost in a good chapter I realise I should have started working again five minutes ago.

But in truth, the fact that I’m reading again is almost solely down to one person – and it’s someone I won’t meet for another three months.

Of all the gifts my parents gave me, my love of books was by far the best. Even before I could read, I remember having books in my hand: big fat chunky things made of cardboard with corners that were usually chewed to death. One of my earliest memories is of hiding under the covers, way past bedtime, shaking with silent giggles as I read one of my parents’ collections of Calvin and Hobbes strips. Being allowed to wander around a bookshop, full of the smell of paper and ink and a thousand worlds waiting behind a thousand brightly coloured covers, was the greatest treat I could imagine.

Now, the birth of my first child gets closer and closer, I want to make sure I give them that same love of reading that my parents gave to me. I want them to fall asleep on my chest as I tell them tales of Gruffalos and ill-fated bear hunts. I want their bookshelves to be filled with Beatrix Potter and Captain Underpants. I want to introduce them to all the authors I fell in love with as a child, and I want to see what new authors they’ll find and fall in love with on their own.

It’s going to be an amazing new chapter, and I can’t wait to see how it ends.

If you’re interested, the book I finished was The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. If you like good speculative science-fiction with a lot of humanity, I can’t recommend it enough.