GoKawiilModernity is intent on inculcating short attention spans and insatiable dopamine cravings in its people. Reading has become more difficult and less common. In this piece, Sam Kahn—one of the greatest living essayists and co-founder of The Republic of Letters—tracks his journey with books from youth until today. He speaks honestly and specifically about the pressures working against his reading appetite and ability, and how he has attempted to counteract them.
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400 Blows (1959), directed by François Truffaut.
I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. At the time, it was a joke. I had a bedside table and it was stacked with books, all at different stages of being read. Books migrated to the floor next to the bed, and different stacks migrated to different rooms of the apartment. At the time I really was ravenous. It was clear to me that books were essentially the same as knowledge and were the window into the world—into all kinds of different worlds—but, crucially, that books also contained the key into adulthood. Since then, my reading has basically been in decline and under siege from a wide variety of different adversaries. Let’s list those before getting into my personal reading rehabilitation project.
Middle school, and adolescence in general, were the single greatest blow to my reading. It quickly became clear that, from a social perspective, all this reading was a catastrophic blunder, and I tried to switch gears as quickly as I could—I would come home from school and turn on ESPN or VH1 and try to download pop culture so that I could repeat it back in school the next day.
School itself was an obstacle to my reading. I showed up at my new middle school trying to hide The Republic under The Red Pony, and I’ve had a fantasy from that day to this that the school system would start recognizing and supporting kids like me who clearly were very self-motivated and had an obvious aptitude in one subject as opposed to others. In this fantasy I would have been instantly enrolled in some higher-level English classes and excused from math or science, which, it was completely clear, wasn’t going to be a significant part of my life. But that just wasn’t the case. There were phone calls home, and I learned fairly quickly to revert to the mean.
Then there was social life. I remember carefully packing a suitcase of my books for college when my father told me, “Trust me, there won’t be a moment for reading recreationally.” He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure. I took that seriously, felt a sort of guilty conscience whenever I opened up one of my books and tried to think what I should be doing instead. It was a real surprise to me when I realized, somewhere towards sophomore or junior year, that it wasn’t exactly true and lots of cool, perfectly socially-adjusted people were also reading for fun.
Illustration by Sam Keshishian.
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