fanna for books

It was a warm winter afternoon when I landed on a post while scrolling on my phone under the sun. An app advertised to “maximise reading potential and avoid difficult language” by turning hard books into easy ones popped up. It included an example: a text from The Great Gatsby [“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”] switched to a simpler version [“When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about.”]

I wondered with genuine curiosity what might be so difficult about an idiom or the word ‘advice’ —a word that holds value particularly because it isn’t just something you’re told. But my conformist afternoon activity was leaving me less capable of criticising, so I stopped scrolling, put on my judgemental cap, and decided to scrutinise this growing population of walking contradictions.

People who love books but resist the possibilities of language. Who want invisible points for having read a classic but want to escape the very time it carries within its prose. Who refuse to make progress in their own comprehension skills, waiting for the words to dilute themselves in some servile manner for a “reader” who simply doesn’t like reading.

As much as I’m tempted to, I’ll avoid going down the rabbit hole of what constitutes reading. Especially in a time where those who prefer X over Instagram or TikTok are oddly proud of liking words than visuals—unaware of the many AI written posts feeding the need to dumb down seemingly life-changing advises for the masses. So what constitutes reading isn’t a battle I’m going to engage in today.

I’m more in the mood for declaring war against this monster of optimisation eating away the very essence of reading. To read is to be disrupted. From the simplest of sunny mornings to the darkest of winter nights, reading must bring a sharpness of its own—whether Kafka’s “axe that destroyed the frozen sea within us” or a cupid’s arrow piercing through our heart.

Optimising Language Kills the Joy of Reading

To truly enjoy reading, one has to surrender their comfort-loving ego and be curious about receiving all they don’t yet know: difficult choices, conflicting ideas, long sentences, words you’ll have to pause and search the meaning for. Books are breaking down under the pressure of quickly pulling in readers: action-driven opening pages, avoiding prologues, shortening sentences, deleting too many adjectives, crossing out subplots, and not exploring a thought for enough time because slow-paced books are deemed boring.

Out of the many books I’ve read, I vividly remember those that bored me at certain points. Here, I don’t mean the kind of boredom that translates to disinterest. I mean the kind of boredom that simply asks you if the task at hand is worth continuing—and you, with your attention span struggling amidst the saturation of simulations that call from across a screen, deciding to continue. As Simone Weil said, attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Reading is the act of giving oneself to a story—its characters, its language, its pace. What you take back, whether you stop or continue till the end, should be more than just the act of reading. You should carry a sense of more time, a need to continue reading more in order to discover something more. Like a sense of satisfaction that is a mere guest with no home in your heart.

Reading requires friction, not constant comfort

But this isn’t possible without books demanding an effort from its readers. There is a reason school curricula once placed classic poems and novels in the hands of young students, guided by experienced teachers. These works were meant to be difficult—with the purpose of exposing readers to challenging stories, characters, or prose. Of course, now AI-generated summaries can step in, leaving teachers both wasted and confused. To read a simplified or summarised version of a classic is to cheat yourself out of a rewarding skill.

Not to mention, the beauty of writing itself cannot be experienced when a reader avoids the friction demanded by complex syntax, deep imagery, or rich vocabulary. This is precisely why purple prose has become an absolute villain in contemporary writing discourse. While overly descriptive, exhausting structuring is nothing virtuous, there’s definitely a need for more richness in writing. I shouldn’t be digressing but this is a great place for me to recommend one of my favourite pieces so here you go: Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence.

Anyone eager to escape the difficulty that reading brings alongside its many sweet dreams is being untrue to themselves—depriving themselves of expectations they are capable of meeting, and of the immense thrill that comes from having shared a story with others near and far from you.

---

If you liked reading this piece, you might like other thoughts and observations of mine, put together by my love for long sentences and my worry for short attention spans. Click here for more!