The Reading Rebellion: One Book. Two Weeks. Repeat.
The "nous" of reading, restoring brain circuits, and book recommendations galore
Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.
David L. Ulin
I wanted to start this piece with a reference to a list of prominent writers who have commented that they are finding it increasingly impossible to read deeply. Yet as I sit at our local climbing gym writing this passage, a young girl sits down at the table across from me, cracking open a fat tome: The Unedited Journals of Sylvia Plath. We start to chat, and I ask her how old she is.
“Eleven”, she replies.
“Why did you decide to read Sylvia Plath?”
“I saw someone in The Gilmore Girls read her books. So I read The Bell Jar and I liked it. And then I decided to read this one.”
A few minutes later I relate this interaction to a young teacher friend who also happens to be at the climbing gym. He enthusiastically recalls how he first read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment when he was in grade 10.
“I asked my brother to give me the most challenging book he could think of. It changed my life.”
“How did it change your life?”
“It opened a whole world up. ‘School of emotions’, you know.”
On my way out I note that the young woman at the front desk is engrossed in a novel. I glimpse at the title: Where the Crawdads Sing. We chat for a moment and I venture to ask:
“Why did you chose to read a paperback rather than reading the novel on your phone or an e-reader?”
“Oh, I love the feel of the book. I know where I am in the story and I can dogear my pages. My family went ‘digital’ a few years ago and we have a shared library, but I never felt connected to those books, or that I could really get into them.”
Attention. Insight. Emotion. Connection. Physicality. This snapshot of interactions captures perfectly the core aims underlying The Reading Rebellion.
People are reading more than ever. We are indeed so immersed in a continuous deluge of words that, “the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words found in many a novel.”1
Yet when we sit down to actually read a book, we may find, like
, that the fractured, distracted, speed-reading fostered by the Internet has surreptitiously eroded our “capacity for concentration and contemplation”.23We are collectively losing our “cognitive patience”, and in the process we are losing the depth, the very heart, of our reading. How do we get it back?
Note: If you are just here for the Reading Rebellion Book List, feel free to scroll to the bottom of the post :)
Join and TOMORROW March 22nd at 12 PM EST for our first LIVE meeting on “The 3Rs of Unmachining and The Pull”. To register see the RSVP link at the bottom of this post.
We are excited to announce that from will join and me for our second LIVE meeting of our Communal Digital Fast on Saturday, April 12th, at 2:30 pm EST. Join us as we discuss all things BOOKS and reading in the digital age. Paying subscribers to either School of the Unconformed or Pilgrims in the Machine will have access to the live meeting and discussion. Paid subscriptions are 15% off during our Communal Digital Fast :) 4
The “nous” of reading
I am saying then, that literacy - the mastery of language and the knowledge of books - is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgement of ourselves and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.
from In Defence of Literacy by Wendell Berry
In Rehabilitating Ferals of the Digital Age I observed that without the deep reading of books and mastery of language, the nightmare of tomorrow may well turn us into what Peco refers to as “thin humans”, forever on the surface of things:
the surface of time, by forcing too much hurry and efficiency; the surface of relationships, which will be shallower and more functional; the surface of information, which will keep us credulous; the surface of our own thoughts and feelings, which will keep us alienated from our own depths.
In contrast, extensive and concentrated engagement in books and the wisdom transmitted through their authors helps us to develop a reading “nous”. Nous is a Greek term referring to the faculty of mind necessary to perceive the true and real. Cultivating a reading nous expands us into a fuller, more rooted human being. We gain intellectual nourishment, personal insights, empathy, and a deeper understanding of the world around us from reading books with deep attention. In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis explains,
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors...We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others.
In her investigation of the effects of the digital world on the reading brain, Reader Come Home author Maryanne Wolf insists that, “The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes.”
Wolf relates that neuroscientists who studied the effects of fiction on the brain found that, “…when we read a piece of fiction ‘closely’, we activate regions of the brain that are aligned to what the characters are both feeling and doing.”5
This isn’t restricted to the characters—reading also develops our empathy for real people. And it’s not just that readers are already more empathic; rather, it’s that reading fiction cultivates our empathic abilities.6
In one study, people who read more fiction scored higher on empathy tests, including one involving the ability to read the emotions in human faces. You can take the test yourself here.7
I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain.
Marianne Wolf
Restoring reading brain circuits
Our university-aged daughter commented how many of her classmates consider reading a book simply too much of a “commitment”. It requires effort and sustained attention, both of which they are unwilling (or increasingly unable) to give.
But it is not only youth raised in the digital age who share this experience. When Marianne Wolf, who studied literature before beginning her work in cognitive neuroscience, embarked on a self-experiment to see if her reading brain had changed, she was stunned:
When I began to read Magister Ludi, I experienced the literary equivalent of a punch to the cortex. I could not read it…It was as if someone had poured thick molasses over my brain…To compensate, first I consciously tried to read the text less quickly, to no avail. The rapid speed to which I had become accustomed while reading my daily gigabytes of material did not allow me to slow down enough to grasp whatever Hesse was conveying.
No matter how well-read we are, our inherently malleable brain circuitry will adapt to the mode of reading we most use. So, if we spend most of our days skimming text and jumping between tabs, our eyes will also begin to speed over the well-crafted sentences of our favorite authors.
We develop an unconscious set toward reading based on how we read during most of our digital-based hours. If most of those hours involve reading on the distraction-saturated Internet, where sequential thinking is less important and less used, we begin to read that way even when we turn off the screen and pick up a book or newspaper…There is a worrisome and potentially more lasting aspect to this “bleeding over” effect…:the more we read digitally, the more our underlying brain circuitry reflects the characteristics of that medium.
Our digital dilettantism is reshaping our reading circuitry and the associated attention span so much so that the average memory span of many adults has dropped by more than 50 percent over the last decade.8
Yet the hopeful news is that this drastic change need not be permanent. Because of our brain’s neuroplasticity, our atrophied deep reading circuits have the potential to be restored. Wolf relates her experience as follows:
It took two weeks…only when I forced myself to enter the book did I experience, first, slowing down; second, becoming immersed in the other world in the book; and third, being lifted out of my own. During the process, my world slowed down —just a little—as I recovered my lost way of reading.
If our goal is to convert our hyper attention into deep attention, then reading physical books is one of the most helpful first steps. In Reading as Counter Practice, L. M. Sacasas discusses Wolf’s research on the importance of reading tangible books. This includes the way in which a book provides cues to the embodied mind:
….visual placement on a page or the shifting weight of one side of the book against the other as we make our way through it - which subtly scaffold our comprehension and retention. And, of course, the book is not also the gateway to countless other forms of media the way a smartphone, tablet, or even internet-connected e-reader might be. In these ways, the affordances of the books might be uniquely suited to sustaining deep reading.
Researcher Andrew Piper further argues that “the sensory dimension of print reading adds an important redundancy to information —a kind of ‘geometry’ to words —which contributes to our overall understanding of what we read.”9
Also, to me, the feel, beauty, and history of tangible books is simply irresistible.
The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.
“On Reading” by G.K. Chesterton
Join the Reading Rebellion
If we are to restore our deep reading circuits and rediscover the joy, insight, and myriad of associated benefits of reading fiction, we must begin simply by committing to regularly reading tangible books.
The average reader will take 10-13 hours to finish a 400 page book. There are few of us who are used to devoting “orca-sized time blocks” to reading books such as
10 or 11. However, given that we spend 7 to 16 hours a day on devices, we know that we actually do have the time to read.Even reading just 30 min a day will allow the average reader to finish a shorter novel in under two weeks. If you spend an hour a day, you can complete a 400 page book in a fortnight.
It may be challenging at first to return to the printed page, but with daily persistence and patience, your can recover your “quiet eye”.
The Reading Rebellion thus sets the following challenge:
One book. Two weeks. Repeat.
The Reading Rebellion Book List
To help get you started and offer practical inspiration, I invited Substack writers and readers to share their top five book recommendations and created a reading list of fiction from a variety of genres in the range of 200-400 pages. We specified this length so that they are easily readable within two weeks.
A tremendous THANK YOU to all the writers and readers who contributed!
, , , , , , , , , , , , & many more.Overall Peco and I received nearly 150 book recommendations12 which we have categorized below into four different time periods: 1800 to 1899; 1900 to 1949; 1950 to 1999; and 2000 to present.
Please note that, although
and I have read many books on this list, we are not familiar with all of them and don’t vouch for their content in any way. Check out the Goodreads links for more information.
You can use this simple Reading Rebellion Note Page to create your personal list:
1800-1899
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
Adam Bede by George Eliot (1859)
Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Armin (1898)
Ennui by Maria Edgeworth (1809)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (1896)
Lilith by George MacDonald (1895)
Little Men by Louisa May Alcott (1871)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott (1817)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811)
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886)
The Moonstone by Wilke Collins (1868)
The Pioneers by James Fennimore Cooper (1823)
The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald (1883)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)
1900-1949
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams (1945)
Arabella by Georgette Heyer (1949)
Arsene Lupin: Gentleman-Thief by Maurice Leblanc (1907)
Blandings Castle / Jeeves books by PG Wodehouse (1935 /1919)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty (1946)
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge (1944)
Kristin Lavransdatter (contains 3 books) by Sigrid Undset (1920)
N or M? by Agatha Christie (1941)
Never No More by Maura Laverty (1942)
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (1913)
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (1927)
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945)
The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (1926)
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1949)
The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff (1931)
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
The Pearl by John Steinbeck (1947)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple (1944)
1950-1999
84 Charring Cross Road / Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff (1970/ 1985)
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1967)
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr (1980)
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1989)
An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden (1955)
Blindness by Jose Saramago (1995)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (1957)
Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgens (1971)
Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield (1998)
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (1935)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
He Leadeth Me by Walter Ciszek (1973)
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow (1959)
Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover (1998)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven (1967)
Immortality by Milan Kundera (1990)
In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden (1969)
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969)
Lonesome Dove / Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry (1985 / 1997)
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (1987)
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (1956)
Symposium by Muriel Spark (1990)
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
The Children of Men by P.D. James (1992)
The Chill by Ross Macdonald (1964)
The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell (1992)
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West (1956)
The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy (1966)
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson (1941)
The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)
The Red Lion: The Elixir of Eternal Life by Maria Szepes (1946)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
The Sicilian by Mario Puzo (1984)
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence (1964)
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle (1995)
The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick (1958)
The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay (1950)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis (1956)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)
2000-Present
A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers (2021)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
Alexandria by
(2020)All the Living by C.E. Morgan (2009)
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2013)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
Exogenesis by
Gaskovski (2023)Farewell Cowboy by Olja Savičević Ivančević (2010)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (2004)
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002)
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (2012)
Legion: The Many Lives of Steven Leeds by Brandon Sanderson (2012)
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (2006)
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Kruger (2013)
Orphan X by Greg Hurwitz (2016)
Piranesi by Susanna Clark (2020)
Sadie / The Project by Courtney Summers (2018)
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (2022)
Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft (2013)
Silverview by John le Carre (2021)
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (2018)
Sleeping Giants by Rene Denfeld (2024)
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014)
(2013)The Circle/The Every by Dave Eggers (2018 / 2021)
The Corrections & Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (2001/2021)
The Future by Naomi Alderman (2023)
The Good Death of Kate Montclair by
(2023)The Lighthouse / Strangers and Sojourners by Michael D. O’Brien (2020/1997)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (2014)
The Noticer by Andy Andrews (2009)
The Oceans and the Stars by Mark Helprin (2023)
The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock (2010)
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy (2022)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart (2000)
(2024)The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (2001)
This is Happiness by Niall Williams (2019)
Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman (2009)
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger (2018)
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyam (2020)
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)
(2021)When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (2020)
Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019)
On the go…
The Penguin “little black classics” are coincidentally about the size of a smartphone — an excellent replacement if you are looking to free yourself from mindless scrolling.
Looking for more classic reads?
See our book lists featured in A Guide to Booklegging:
Join
’s superb “slow read” of War and Peace (a chapter a day)How to get started reading English literature by
A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities by
Also see
’s Deep Reads Book ClubIf you would like to start your kids on reading classics, check out the audiobooks on the
!
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Will you join The Reading Rebellion?
What book are you planning to read?
What are your top five fiction book recommendations?
We’d love to hear from you! Please share your questions, thoughts, and reflections in the comments section!
Join and TOMORROW March 22nd at 12 PM EST for our first LIVE meeting “The 3Rs of Unmachining and The Pull”. To register see the RSVP link at the bottom of this post.
Mark your calendar: from will join
and me for our second LIVE meeting of our Communal Digital Fast on Saturday, April 12th, at 2:30 pm EST.Join us as we discuss all things BOOKS and reading in the digital age!
If the ideas Peco and I write about resonate with you, why not consider joining us for a most extraordinary extended conversation?
Together with
, we will be leading an 11-day Camino Pilgrimage in Spain from June 14th to 24th, and would love for you to join us as we walk, converse, share meals, visit historic sites, build relationships, all while hiking through a naturally and spiritually inspiring landscape. We had SOLD OUT for a while, but the tour company made some extra spaces available!For details see this post, download the brochure below, or register directly here.
Reader, Come Home - The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Marianne Wolf
Our attention has been on a downward drift for decades: In a 1951 letter to author Richard Matheson, Bradbury lamented, “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’ … This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.” https://www.laweekly.com/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/
If you cannot afford the paid subscription but would like to join, simply send us a direct message and we’ll comp you:)
Other researchers even found that our brain areas related to touch are activated when reading metaphors about texture.
In relation to community engagement,
spearheaded an investigation into the state of literary reading which found that people who did not read books were less likely to vote, volunteer, visit museums, or attend arts and sports events.Our entire family took the test and it was quite fascinating. Give it a try!
The Organized Mind by David Levitin
Wolf makes the following observation about youth raised in the digital age: “many of them say that when they read on a screen, they are 90 percent likely to be multitasking and only 1 percent likely to multitask when reading on print media.”
As this list is focused specifically on fiction between 200 and 400 pages, I did not include non-fiction recommendations or books that were nearly 600 pages.
Reading saved my life last year. I was the caregiver for my elderly mother and also responsible for cleaning out and selling her large home. I had to be away from my home and family for 3 1/2 months and a large part of that time was spent with ambulances, hospitals and general upheaval. The one thing I had to look forward to at the end of the day was my books. I brought an entire series with me in my suitcase and I would read and calm my mind until the wee hours. My kids gave me a Kindle reader, and it would have made sense to bring that instead, but I rarely use it. It doesn't seem...real. I don't mind making extra room for my books when I travel, as I consider them essential.
Your book list looks wonderful but I have to pipe in and say: no Michael D. O’Brien?! Surely everyone must at *least* read Island of the World! I know you can’t add all of his books, but this one…one of the best ever written imho!