I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind even when my goal is to stay on top of things.

So I feel that, in this episode, it’d be good to get back to basics.

Let’s talk about reading. Yeah, remember that? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started.

In Episode 87, I talk about:

1. Why it’s so hard to stay focused on books (down to the nuts and bolts of what our eyes have been trained to do)
2. What deep reading does to enrich your life
3. Some ways you can rebuild your reading habit
4. A reminder that the sheer number of books and subjects for you to read about is more than you could ever begin to approach

To sum-up: between now and my fortieth birthday next February, I’m going to aim to be a more thoughtful reader and retrain my brain to become fully immersed in books rather than just skim the surface.

If that sounds like something you’d like for yourself, let me know at emily@hybridpubscout.com, on LinkedIn, or on Bluesky @emilyeino.

Welcome to the hybrid Cub Scout podcast helping

you navigate the publishing landscape. I'm M Einolander, and

I explore resources and services so authors can be successful and

safe as they pursue publishing. I'm just going to be honest with

y'all, I'm overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the

world of publishing and providing a resource for

authors. But everything is moving so quickly, it's easy to

feel left behind when my goal is to stay on top of things, so I

feel that today it'd be good to get back to basics. Let's talk

about reading. Yeah, yeah. Remember that, if I'm not

mistaken, that's what we're all doing here, or at least why we

started. My suspicion is that even those of us who are reading

aren't necessarily reading the way we want to, with as much

gusto and immersion as we know we're capable of, or wonder

whether we're still capable of. Recently, I celebrated my 39th

birthday, and there's something about facing down the final year

of my 30s that's making me reflective about what I'm

putting in my brain when I turn 40, what will I have learned?

Whose voices will I have listened to? How have I

participated in the world, in the context of my vocation and

hobbies, most of which have books at their core, and I'm not

talking about eating my psychological vegetables, I

don't regret the horror and romance and other genre fiction

that I've made part of my reading life in the slightest,

but I want to incorporate More media books and other written

words in particular, that substantial, memorable and

enhances my life in a way that just accepting whatever the

algorithm serves me can't and sure, these reflections come

from the fact that I'm aging, but also because of how

underwhelmed I feel about my reading habits for the past few

years, there are some real winners in my red list. Don't

get me wrong, but I've occasionally noticed myself

shying away from things I know would be thought provoking and

maybe even life changing, and I've been asking myself, why is

that there's a tendency to become protective of our minds

in a way that's fear based, rather than simply selective. I

mean, just look at the types of books that are getting banned.

There's a literal panic around subject matter that people find

threatening. But as much as I try to be open minded, something

in my head is more resistant than ever to things that are too

novel, if you'll pardon the pun, 2020. Set a precedent where we

read so much less than usual, even though supposedly we had

more time, I mostly just scrolled while waiting to see

whatever the next disaster was. And even though I have picked up

the pace since then, I think that year put me in a habit of

resistance to reading more challenging subject matter. It's

a little embarrassing, but I have uncovered a need for

psychological safety in myself that I didn't have before. It's

easy to watch low impact shows and movies and stick to

predictable, tropetastic stories. I do love romance, but

it's also a genre for people who want to know exactly what to

expect, and I can admit to myself that that's a big part of

why I gravitate toward it these days, predictably, staying

cocooned in my comfort zone takes a lot of magic out of

literature and life. Call it complacency or emotional

overload or even collective trauma, but I think things like

last year's drop in nonfiction sales shows that I'm in line

with overall trends. The challenge of sitting down and

learning something new is a lot for people to take. Educating

ourselves with books is essential for people to seek out

justice and learn from history and sharpen critical thinking.

But in moments like these, it can seem like either not enough

or too much, and for me, the last couple of years have been

pretty cognitively challenging in another way. I had a

debilitating chronic migraine situation, and around the same

time, I had to adjust to a few other health related issues that

took up a lot of my emotional and mental bandwidth, as well as

physical and yeah, I read, but the brain fog that comes with

those types of issues can make you feel like everything is just

flowing through your brain and out again, like water through

gravel. But now my health challenges seem to be in more

maintenance mode, and I'm waking up on the edge of middle age

with this urgency to make all the time I spend with a clear

head count for. Something. It feels kind of like crawling out

of a swamp covered in mud and half hyperventilating, and then

having someone walk up while you're still on the ground and

say, Oh, good, you're back. Here's your to do list. And I am

both of those people in this situation for the record, I I am

told I am too hard on myself, but that doesn't change what I

would like between now and my 40th birthday next year, my goal

is to take a more thoughtful, more carefully engaged approach

to the book, stories and articles and poetry I read. I

want to read poetry and pick up classic novels I've been putting

off. And if you stuck around to listen to me ramble this long,

it might be because you're interested in doing something

similar. If you've been a reader for a long time and have

experienced the kind of fatigue I've been describing, and I know

for a fact that's a lot of people who either write books or

interact with them in some way, you might relate to the idea of

wanting to renew, refresh and show courage in your

relationship with reading. Personally, I want to challenge

myself again, and I'm hoping you'll join me, both to keep our

brains from melting and to hopefully uncover inspiration

and knowledge that we can use to make a positive impact on the

world. Because even if it feels like it's ending, we're not dead

yet. So we can't stop trying the volume of information we're

faced with daily is insurmountable. It's like trying

to squeeze 1000s of people through a single doorway, or

trying to drink the ocean with a straw. One study from UC San

Diego determined that the average person consumes about 34

gigabytes of information across our various devices every day.

That's the equivalent of 100,000 words or a solid medium large

fiction book. And the wildest part is that study came out in

the 2010s so imagine what it's like now. We can't give our full

attention to every single thing that comes across our path. Our

tiny brains can't process it as an adaptation to most of our

reading now being done online, we've all learned how to skim

our vision zigzags from the top of the page to the bottom the

headline, intro, conclusion, and then does a side to side sweep

for points of context. Then we might go back through the text

to search for details to the degree that we think we might

need them. It's not the most effective way to take in a long

form story or article, but definitely a more realistic way

to approach a world with too many units of information

constantly vying for our attention. But sometimes it's

even less comprehensive than that, and this is where I'm

going to get judgy. I've seen trends where people skim read

books in that they skip paragraphs or pages entirely. If

they're deemed too long or too text heavy, they'll look for

lines of dialog or keywords instead. And some people aren't

even bothering to read more than AI summaries. Yes, yes, that's

true. There are people doing that. They really, really want

you to read these summaries. By the way. I mean, this PDF looks

so long, do you want me to summarize it for you? And this

isn't tick tock panic. I've heard people say these things in

person, and I'm not on tick tock. Fuck tick tock. Anyway,

this haunts me. I lose sleep over it. And if this sounds

mean, so be it. But I've encountered people, both on and

offline, who identify as book lovers but are almost solely

skim readers. Most seem a little sheepish or frustrated about it,

which is relatable. It's hard to overhaul the way you read from

one format to another, and our brains are now all accustomed to

a world that is constantly spewing garbage at us, but

others proudly admit to it and get annoyed when books don't

accommodate their shallow reading style, too many words.

Why do these authors expect me to read all that? I only read

dialog, and that's when I turn into the Joker. Rage bait taken,

I'm flopping around on the bottom of the boat waiting for

the club to put me out of my misery. But who cares if I'm mad

about it, right? Who am I to tell people how to spend their

free time? But here's my appeal for your own benefit. As a

reader, if you're a writer, hopefully you're able to

recognize what people are giving you when they read your book.

You're making a bid for them to spend hours of the only life

they have on what you've created. It's not a small thing

for either of you, writer or reader, and when they do make

that choice, you want it to be worth it for them, right? And

now let's turn that around and say that as a reader, you

probably want the books you pick up to matter, right? So why stay

on the surface? Don't you want more? Here's what I'm not going

to do today. I'm not going to define what a good book is.

Everyone has a different concept of what is challenging and what

is enjoyable, and whether a book is good or bad is immaterial to

this conversation. This is more about the way in which we read.

You. It's a case for reading deeply and with full

concentration. It's a plea for us to do our best to rebuild our

strength and our ability to concentrate on a book, even

though the way most of us have been rewired can make that kind

of a slog. If we're just talking about retraining that connection

between your eyeballs and your comprehension. You could read

any kind of book deeply. Hell. You can read fan fiction deeply.

You can also read philosophy or the classics shallowly. And if

you're still at the beginning stages of getting your reading

mojo back, maybe something snootier People might consider

low brow is the on ramp you need to get back into it. Only you

can be the judge of whether that's leading you in the

direction you want to go. Quality reading requires you to

concentrate on something for more than a few seconds, or even

a few minutes at a time, without getting distracted. It requires

you to read a full page instead of skimming the first and last

lines of each paragraph. It opens you up to new sentence

structures and words and concepts you may never have

heard before. And when you take note of these things, that's

when the enrichment begins. And to be able to do this, I'm going

to admit right now, I have to do the thing that we had to do when

we were kids, where you take a piece of paper or the back of a

bookmark and slowly move it down the page. I literally have to do

that to keep my eyes from jumping all over and missing all

of the important stuff that high quality attention has been one

of the major barriers holding us back from engaging with books in

the way we used to the way we still want to like what fun is a

long fantasy novel, if you have to remind yourself what's

happening every five minutes because you keep looking at your

phone, I am absolutely preaching to myself here. There's another

complicating factor for people whose job is tied up in books as

publishing people, editors, writers, book reviewers, even

booksellers. We can get fatigued incredibly easily with the

expectations placed on us, and we can find ourselves more

focused on volume overweight. That's not a moral failing.

We're responding to our environment and the pressures

placed on us to stay in the loop, and especially if we're

editing, we are doing something resembling a deep read, a

different, harder, more draining version of it. But maybe you've

been asked to write blurbs, or you have to beta an upcoming

book for a friend, or you just have to get the gist of a huge

stack of romance novels so you can make an Instagram image

carousel. Maybe you're a writer who is struggling so hard to get

enough words on the page every day that putting more words into

your brain seems insurmountable no matter how much you know you

should or no matter how much you want to. And maybe you're just

exhausted, fried by too much information, like everyone, even

the non book readers, but reading, deep, focused reading

contextualizes things that are happening to you and around you

so you can see patterns of history and social and

environmental phenomena. It arms you with information that will

help you move forward, even when that might seem impossible. It

helps you empathize with others and understand points of view

you haven't considered before, and any genre fiction or

nonfiction can help fill those gaps. Reading can be more than

just an escape hatch from a terrifying world or something

you do to keep your place in a community. It's not just lip

service to say that reading is one of the most profound things

you can do with your time. So while I was working on this, I

read a book called reader come home, by a neuroscientist and

literacy advocate, Mary Ann Wolf. You might have heard of

her. She also wrote a book called Proust and the squid, and

that's the one that made her well known as a researcher of

reading in the brain. Wolff quotes neuroscientist David

Eagleman, who said that there are as many connections in a

single cubic centimeter of brain tissues that there are in the

Milky Way galaxy. And she goes on to describe how each of those

constellations that form in our brains are different for every

person on earth, when you give all your focus to reading, you

blast that old aphorism about only using 10% of your brain to

bits. Reading combines the parts of your brain that control

language, vision, motor skills, cognition. It calls on us to

access background knowledge we have about different subjects,

knowing the definitions of words, knowing basic geography

and history, understanding the lore of a fantasy world. And

here's what makes reading so important. If you want to be a

positive force in the world, you gain the type of understanding

that makes what you find in books comprehensible from other

books. For every book you read, you increase your chances of

getting even more out of the next one. The less background

knowledge you have, the harder it is to engage with a book, and

unfortunately, the harder it is to engage with a book, the less

you'll feel like reading, and the less background knowledge

you'll accumulate. That's part of what made it so hard to read

as a kid, at least for me, the fact that I had so little

knowledge of the world, but it's also one of the few ways to

gain, and especially remember that background knowledge. So

this is going to be hard no matter what, but that so called

empathy we supposedly gain when we read fiction, that value

comes from giving the characters our full attention and truly

inhabiting their worlds. We don't get that from just

floating on the surface of a story. This is part of why I'm

saying start easy and with things you enjoy, but pay

attention, because the more clues you gather, the better

your experience will get. If you do want to read more books that

challenge you, you need to be able to associate books with

feeling good. That could mean hedonic pleasure, which means

it's enjoyable while you're doing it, or are eudaimonic, the

pleasure you feel after having accomplished something, but

pretending you can develop a reading habit without some type

of emotional reward involved is self deluding. You'll just stop

trying if everything's too hard. Remember that reading can be

about what you want to learn or what you want to enjoy, not just

about keeping up with what everyone else is. Into one

estimate that I'll link in the notes put the number of books in

the world at 158,464,880 164,880 you can find a book on basically

anything you're curious about, and to get super Reading Rainbow

about it. There's an entire world of books out there, even

if you, like me, can't get out and see the regular world as

much as other people might be able to, whether that's because

of money or disability or whatever else you have windows

to the rest of existence at hand, and reading diversely is

what will help reading carry you to new places you might not have

visited otherwise. So when we talk about diverse reading, you

might go to movements like Own Voices, or We Need Diverse

Books. This ongoing effort to publish more from people of all

races, ethnicities, abilities, genders and sexualities. But

I've noticed that if someone says I should read books

featuring quote, unquote, diversity of thought, I always

hear it as a euphemism for read an inflammatory money grab by a

Fox News pundit, which I am not going to do. But honestly,

reading diversely is a win for everyone, and it's easier than

you think, unless you're reading only things in one genre from

one pool of authors who all follow each other on Instagram,

your instincts are probably already leading you in a diverse

direction. Any expert who writes a nonfiction book will have

different thoughts than you have reading something in translation

from a different country. They'll explore things that

aren't even on your radar. And yeah, definitely read books from

people of different races, genders and sexualities, even if

you have similar values, your opinions are never going to

perfectly align. And you can read books from 2030, 5100, or

more years ago. There is absolutely no way someone

writing back then is going to use the same terminology or look

at things from the same perspective as you do, and if

they do, I don't know, I guess, get back in the time machine

before you kill us all. Now, as for format, different things do

happen in your brain when you're listening versus reading with

your eyeballs. If you're on a mission to regrow your attention

span and your ability to do close reading, research suggests

you will have an easier time tracking and remembering what

you read when it's on paper, books versus ebooks or audio,

but also, audio books are real books. Ebooks are real books. If

you are the most comfortable reading in those formats, that's

your on ramp. Great. As long as you're able to engage with a

story, you're on the right track. And if you're thinking,

em, everyone is broke, where are we going to get the money for

all these books? Okay, for one thing, you probably have a big

TBR on your shelf. But also, let me remind you that there are

still libraries, and they need you to visit them and check out

books to keep from dying out.

There's also the Internet Archive, and if you've got a

little bit of disposable income and are looking to buy there's

your local used bookstore or indie bookstore, or if you're

determined not to leave the house, thrift books, hell, if

you use Amazon, there's Kindle Unlimited. There's lots on

Kindle Unlimited, in fact. And if you can't find one book you

really want to read at a reasonable price point, you.

There is a long backlist of books. Remember that that big

number in the millions that I gave you that spans hundreds of

years, there's got to be something in there that you want

to read like for real. The plan for how to keep yourself in the

reading game is something you'll have to figure out for yourself.

But here's what I'm currently trying out, I found that I'm the

kind of person that will inevitably read more than one

book at a time. Having a books in waiting pile in a range of

different formats and genres keeps me from getting decision

paralysis. On that list, I keep a collection of short stories or

essays, a book of poetry, a horror and or romance book, and

then something a little more challenging, usually lit fic or

nonfiction. And yes, because otherwise I'll get super

sidetracked. I do read those more challenging ones with a

paper and pen and sticky notes, just for the books I own. Never

put sticky notes in a library book. And here's a really

important one, I let myself DNF books if I don't like them, and

I let myself switch to a different book if I want to read

it more than the one I've got going on. That's so I never stop

reading altogether. I would love to hear what struggles you've

been having with your own experience as a reader, so we

can commiserate. And I'd also like to hear what's on your TBR.

Do you read one book at a time? Do you read multiple books at a

time? What keeps you in the game when it comes to reading books,

you can reach out to me by emailing me at

emily@hybridpubscout.com Find me on LinkedIn M Einolander, or on

blue sky at Emily, I know you can also visit my website,

hybridpupscout.com thanks for listening and happy reading.

You. You.