Well-read is well-fed

The Christmas and New Year break is often my most anticipated holiday of the year. Perhaps I haven’t grown up yet but for me, there’s still something magical about early December. The city gets dressed up to look its best in big bows and tinsel. Tiny over-excited children begin to fill Bourke St Mall, dancing around like popcorn in a pan about to burst with joy because Santa Clause is comin’ to town. Richie Benaud’s dole set tones leak out of the television on warm summer days and tumble in to nearby rooms in the house. Christmas brings this wonderful air of anticipation and it affords the opportunity to reflect on the year passed – the achievements and the dissapointments. In my own reflection, one point has consistently niggled at my conscience and that is recently, I haven’t been able to write because I haven’t been able to read.

No, I haven’t contracted an illness that has affected my literacy levels, it’s not an onset of dyslexia or attention deficit disorder. Time is also not an excuse and I haven’t fallen out of love with design, far from it. After taking some time out and looking inwards at my habits in general and barriers to sitting down with a book over the last 5 months, two reasons have distinguished themselves as the root cause of my lack of reading. Firstly, I never developed the habit of reading as a child and secondly, books often fail to hold my interest long enough for me to get to the end of one.

As children, my younger brother and I never read books; not books that were outside of the school study curriculum anyway. It wasn’t that we couldn’t read or didn’t like reading, we were both very proficient readers but we were simply so involved in weekend sports that there wasn’t enough time in the day to sit down with a book. Not having developed this habit of reading in my early years means that today, I still see reading as something you do when you can’t go outside and play. Reading for me is a chore; the last alternative. I feel restless when I’m sitting idle and if I’m not engaged in the content of a book from page one, I find that I force myself to turn pages for ten minutes only to have to constantly turn back and re-read parts because the words that entered through my eyes never made it to my brain. When this happens regularly, it’s hard to see what value, if any, continuing to read will have.

My second barrier to reading is getting to the end of a book. If I don’t read a book from beginning to end I feel incredibly guilty. It sounds ridiculous as a read that statement back to myself but I find that if don’t get to the last word on the last page of a book I feel as though I have a weak attention span, like I’ve failed or that digital technology has altered my brain in such a way that I’ve lost the ability to concentrate on any written piece for more than 300 words at a time. I very seldom blame the poor writing of an author or the fact that I actually have no interest in the subject matter or genre of book I happen to read – both of which are very valid arguments to put down a book and move on to the next one.

Having said all of this, when I do read, I know how I read. I often read 2 or 3 chapters in one sitting and with two or 3 more chapters in the next sitting I forget what I had read in my first one. This only reinforces to me that reading is less productive then physical exercise. It has never crossed my mind to try to consider reading as exercise for the brain and that I should force myself to continue despite not being able to reap the rewards of viewing the Adonis staring back at me in the mirror after a boxing or weights session.

Throughout September I tried hard to write. In fact the harder I tried to write about all the sprouting ideas in my head the more I failed. It felt like trying to eat the fruit from a tree whose fruit wasn’t quite ripe yet. The nectarines were crunchy and the oranges were sour. I thought I would just give it some time, incubate a little and wait for the writing to ripen however, the longer I waited the less important each idea seemed to be. Before I knew it I had waited 5 months and all I had to show for it was a failed, tasteless crop of half-formed ideas and half-finished sentences.

In trying to avoid slipping in to a turkey-induced coma on Christmas afternoon, I aimlessly flicked through my trusty moleskine notebook. It’s where I jot down odd thoughts, observations and ideas while I’m out and about, I never leave home without it. While flicking the pages, refreshing my memory on things I’ve seen and read, I stumbled across a quote from Paul Rand from a book of his a couple of years ago

“If you don’t read, you just don’t know. [Reading] is nourishment when you run – you do not eat bread while you are running.”

With a sporting background like mine, the running analogy that Paul Rand used rang familiar sounding bells. It was after reading this quote that I realized how my lack of reading in the last part of 2011 had actually affected the way my brain was operating. It wasn’t receiving its nourishment; it wasn’t being fuelled for the marathon of being a designer everyday. It was in a stupor of responding to circumstantial stimulus rather than being trained and honed to find a creative solution to any problem from even the most unlikely of situations. It affected my ability to articulate what it was I was trying to communicate.

I went on to review my “About Me” page from my blog shortly after reading Paul Rand’s quote and re-discovered the reason why I had started the blog in the first place – I had formed a habit of reading. Reading had helped me overflow with thoughts about design and encouraged me to reflect, critically analyse and continually question my own creative process. It helped me open my ‘observer-eye’ and re-think everyday occurrences in a new light. I started to use the blog as a way of organizing these thoughts and responding to experiences. Improving my writing was only ever meant to be a by-product and yet here I was, in September 2011 concerned about having ‘writer’s block’.

As my wife (an avid reader) often does, she noticed my frustration before I did. It’s no surprise that my Christmas presents from her were in fact books (accompanied by this wonderful lego project). She knows I’m not a ‘natural’ reader (especially with the sunny Australian summer weather that drags one outdoors) but none the less she understood what my brain had been missing these passed months. Perhaps it was also her cunning plan, or maybe a stroke of serendipity, that we managed to squeeze in a trip to Gould’s Books in Newtown while on holidays.

To call Gould’s books enormous would be an understatement. It’s where books go to die – literally, book heaven. I browsed the aisles of the bookshop for at least 2 hours, an easy task with almost 1 million to choose from. I dived in to the design books, meandered amongst the biographies and perused the popular fiction only to end up in health sciences (the least likely place I thought I’d find myself). I selected a book from the shelf called Mind and Memory Training by Ernest E. Wood purely because of the cover design; it had beautiful vintage colours and beautiful vintage type which made it jump at me from the shelf. I almost bought it immediately for the aesthetic alone. I flicked the pages lazily while waiting for my wife to finish her browsing and I landed on a section at the back of the book called “The Mind at Work – Reading and Study”. I began to read,

“Read for correction, not for information. Think first then read. When you pick up a book to read, let us say, a chapter on the habits of elephants, you will not immediately open the book and plunge in to the subject. You will first sit with the book unopened on your knee or on the table and say to yourself, “Now, just what do I know about the habits of elephants?” It may be much or it may be little or next to nothing that you know, but whatever it is, you must make yourself review your own knowledge first before you start to add to it. If you have twenty minutes to read, think for 5 and read for 15.”

The concept that the author introduced to me here is what I now refer to as “Active Reading.” Reading non-fiction should first be an activity of affirmation or investigation in to thoughts and ideas that I’ve already got and only after this affirmation should I try to add to it. The author goes on to talk about how preparing for reading is like getting your house in order before trying to fit in the grand piano or another bookshelf. First, find everything you already own that may match this new piece of furniture. Then, arrange it all in a logical order, put each piece in their proper place and it becomes much easier to see where you can make room for your new furniture. The author suggests that doing this will not only allow you to keep your attention on the subject matter for longer but will increase your brain’s ability  to hold the information once you begin to read.

I find that this concept can also be applied to choosing what to read. It would feel odd and unsettling to put a never-before-seen modern chrome and black leather chair in a country-style, wooden and plaid kitchen if you’ve lived in the country-style house for your whole life. Of course, that’s not to say that you should never purchase anything that doesn’t match your existing decor; the styles that you’re comfortable and familiar with. To learn anything about a brand new domain, to introduce any new piece of furniture, one has to start somewhere. Should you wish to add that chrome and leather chair to an old familiar house, you might build a new, empty room first. Take the first moments of reading and relax with the knowledge that you know nothing of what you’re about to read. Perhaps start with painting the walls a sterile white then place the chair inside and spend some time with it – study it from every angle, sleep in your new room, review the chair to become super familiar with it until it feels as comfortable as the country kitchen once did. Perhaps then it might be time to bring home a matching modern lamp and begin to fill out the room with these related items, to build knowledge and familiarity of this new, once alien domain.

Although the concept of active reading sparked some interest in this book, it didn’t address my second barrier to reading; getting to the end of a book. Back in the bookshop I flipped to another page and read a paragraph at random;

“It is always best to have a good book on hand, on philosophy, on history, on travel or science or any other subject to which one can turn to several times a week for mental recreation. There should be no thought of reaching the end of the book, it is to be lived with.”

The sentence “It is to be lived with” brings to mind a long-lasting and comforting relationship – one you seldom get with digital technology but one that books so obviously lend themselves to.  In fact, with digital technology, the relationship we have is quite the opposite. If my bookshop experience was a scene from a movie, the angel’s trumpets would have sounded, the choir would have sung in full voice, a shining light would have beamed down on me from above and bestowed upon me a glowing halo of peace, calm and tranquility. A weight had been lifted and it was finally OK for me to stop reading a book before I got to the end.

Unlike the way we consume digital technology, books seem to imply a linearity – a beginning, a middle and an end; a left to right continuum. When was the last time anyone picked up a book and started reading from the middle? It seems counter-intuitive to do so because of the medium in which the content is being delivered. It will no doubt take practice for me to adopt some of the advice in Mind and Memory Training. It sounds easy in practice but I know long-standing childhood habits are hard to change. Perhaps my continuing journey as a reader will lead to an intersection where the habits of digital content consumption that I’ve naturally been developing over the past 10 years can aid my ability and confidence to consume the printed word in a more efficient, useful and memorable way. I’m interested to see where this leads.

Just as Christmas is a good time for reflection, it’s also a good time to think about the future and set goals and plans. My plan? To read. Not necessarily read more, but read better. To think and then read. To read and then write. It probably goes without saying but I slipped the book under my arm and headed to the front counter to pay for it. I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and family and headed home to Melbourne full of confidence that in 2012, I’ll be well-read and well-fed. Come December next year, I hope to have a bumper crop so that I might have the pleasure to indulge and feed a few hungry minds. If not, I’ll simply enjoy the process of writing and exploring creativity knowing that each word I type, each thought I explore is all part of shaping me in to a better thinker and a better designer.