[resend] reading is being in good company

forgive me, I managed to balls this up yesterday and sent it out to paid subscribers only which was very much not the intention. However, maybe it was fortuitous in a way as there was a big influx of subscribers after my Guardian piece about the C25K for Reading so, welcome new subscribers! As I say below, you can start here in one of two ways for August, you are NEVER BEHIND and we are human-made here with all of the human-made errors in sending out posts to the wrong contingent of subscribers and having to sort it out on the Monday…

TELL ME MUSE ABOUT A COMPLICATED FELLOW, who was known for his wit and his cleverness, who was sent far from home and fell out of favour with a god1, who tried and tried to return home to his beloved wife and child… but in this case he was a real man and (spoiler) he never got to go home. Yes, it’s my favourite friend in the Ancient world: Ovid. This week is Ovid Week in the Couch to 5k for Reading, well I didn’t want you to get complacent that you knew what was coming next.

But in fact it’s a massive grab-bag this week of different things! Firstly of course, we are HALFWAY THROUGH the Couch to 5k for reading! Toot toot! Well done to everybody who is keeping on with it, and if you have fallen behind with it, as some crisis or other happened, just start again from where you were.

But listen, if you are just finding out about this today and just getting started, or if you want a fresh start for a new month, you can do two things:

• you can start from the beginning today, and by the end of August you will be at week five, and that is a bloody good achievement for August, and then you’ll be finishing in September, a lovely month for getting to a great place with your reading in advance of the longer evenings coming in the months ahead.

• orrrr… if your August tends to be your quietest month of the year, where you know that you have more time to build back up your reading than any other time of year, you could try just jumping in with where we are right now. I think I would probably say if you’re going to try this, start this week with track 1, reading 10 minutes a day, twice, for a total of 20 minutes a day. Then you can just follow along with track 1, dip back into any of the enrichments you fancy. Or if after the first week you feel really confident, you can see if you want to move up a track for the remaining weeks of August. I don’t say you should do this, it just occurred to me that many people have a lot more time in August than much of the rest of the year, so you can see how it works for you to dive in with a 30-day programme.

I am loving getting these answers from people about why they read and how they pick what they’re going to read next. Anna Wharton writes brilliant essays about all sorts of things, including writing at her substack White Ink. She also has the fantastic feature of the Sunday Shelfie, where people show what is on their bookshelves. This is, of course, always the first thing I look at when I go into anybody’s home. So it’s really enjoyable to have a nose around.

I think the world can feel quite overwhelming at times, and we find deep solace in books. Not just companionship, our own lives reflected back to us, or messages from other people’s lives — ones we can’t even imagine — that somehow shine a brighter light on our own experiences. Not even the escapism of a novel, but something more than that. Some people spend a lot of time and money on mindfulness for example, they want to switch off their brain, their mind, sometimes we might do that with a bit of easy watching TV, but it’s not really the same, we’ve always got our phone in our hand at the same time, responding to texts, or looking up tomorrow’s weather. A good reason to read more is because it is a mindful task to lose yourself in a book, to let your brain fully immerse, give it a little holiday, so to speak. We forget how important that is.

I would like to say that I pick from my bookshelves because I do have hundreds of books there patiently awaiting my attention, but the thing about books is that there is always something newer, shinier, to read. However, saying that, I am often reading thematically, at the moment I’m putting together my Writing Mothers course and it surprises me just how many books about that experience I have on my shelves. So yes, I pick a theme and immerse myself in it. I find that so thoroughly satisfying.

Thank you so much Anna! One of the things I’ve loved so much about doing this programme is that I am also reading much more and much more intentionally than I was before. And I really agree with Anna that actually what reading is - apart from all the other things - is a form of mindfulness. You just feel better when you’ve been reading than when you’ve been scrolling. You feel like you have been able to be fully immersed in something, which then pays dividends for the rest of your day. I think starting your day with reading probably is as good as starting your day with meditating in terms of general calmness and ease.

You will notice above that we have a podcast. I realized that I have managed to do two projects over the summer (when I was really supposed to be off entirely…). One is the couch to 5K for reading. The other is that I am occasionally putting up extended versions of interviews that I did for my programme Human Intelligence. This one is about a writer whose work I would love to press on you, and so it felt particularly reasonable to do it to mark the halfway point here.

Here’s the original programme about Ovid. There are loads of things people could say about Ovid, and most of them centre on his most famous work, The Metamorphoses, which is extraordinary, spangled, glittering, a sort of miracle of what we might think of as postmodern storytelling. One tale leading to the next, to the next, to the next, until you’ve completely forgotten how we got here, but you know you’ve loved the journey2. I adore his book The Ars Amatoria3, which is a naughty little book about how you might be able to find a mistress in ancient Rome and what to do with her when you’ve got her. Also, the Heroides, which is loads of tales from classical mythology told purely from the women’s perspectives. As Gail Trimble says in this interview, Ovid writes more women than almost any other author in the ancient world4. Reading him is like spending time with your naughty, funny, well-connected uncle who knows all the gossip and isn’t afraid to tell you.

I personally have always thought of Ovid as an ally and a friend in the ancient world. That might just be because of the one line in the Ars Amatoria where, when talking about where to find good-looking girls, he says, “Don’t neglect the synagogue of the Syrian Jews.” Because pretty girls went there in droves. Until I read that line, I think I’d always thought that I was living through the high-water point of the Jewish experience in Europe. That it had all just been an endless parade of antisemitism and misery until maybe just the post-Holocaust world. With one line, in his erotic whistle-stop tour of ancient Rome, Ovid introduced me to a world I hadn’t known existed. The pre-Christian world in which Jewish people were just another kind of people whose culture an urbane, sophisticated man might want to get to know and indeed fuck. It felt so familiar and modern! He’s precisely a modern person living in London: just heading off to an Ethiopian restaurant, before listening to some music from Latin America and going to a Japanese art exhibition. All the world comes to Rome, and Ovid wants to enjoy it all.

Which I think is why I’ve always found the story of his exile so incredibly moving and fascinating. We don’t really know why Ovid was exiled5, and that’s some of what the interview is about. It’s a real mystery from the ancient world. He was a poet at the height of his powers, a brilliant writer, well respected, and the Emperor Augustus decided to inflict upon him a really vindictive punishment. Not just telling him that he wasn’t allowed to come to Rome any longer, which would have been bad enough. Ovid was sent to the coldest, darkest corner of the Empire, a tiny town - an army encampment, really - on the Black Sea in what is now Romania. Augustus sent Ovid as far as he could from the bright lights of Rome, and he left him there to die. It was a punishment that was deliberately designed to make Ovid miserable.

And he is miserable in Tomis, it’s obvious from the writing6. He is cold, and sad, and far from his friends and all of the life he loved. He wrote two books of poetry from exile, the Tristia and the Epistolae ex Ponto. They are so moving because you can still see his personality in there. He continues to be cheeky and playful with language, even whilst things have gone very badly for him indeed. I find it really heroic, reading that work.

In 2019, I went to visit Tomis, which is now the city of Constanța in Romania. I ate my sandwiches staring at the same sea that he would have stared at, feeling the same wind which did absolutely go right through my coat. I still think sometimes of turning this trip into a book. I went because I felt I really had to, after some great personal sadness. I read his book on the way. I thought about what it means to be a funny, silly writer, and what we have to be aware of: what governments can always do to even the funniest and silliest writers. I thought about the ways that life can break us, and what heroism it is for Ovid to keep on finding jokes to tell. He is my friend in Rome, and he is also a friend in dark times.

From reading the Tristia, you come to understand that he is a man who refuses to disappear. The world sometimes wants to silence and contain us, to make us invisible, and here is a man whom the most powerful person in the world who has tried to humiliate and crush simply… refusing it. He doesn’t hide from us how miserable exile has made him, but he doesn’t stop being himself either. His sentences are still definitely him. He can still do the same word play. He makes risky jokes about Augustus - saying, for example, that if you find his poems dirty, that’s because you have a dirty mind. He knows, I think, that however much he pleads for it he will never be allowed to come home.

If you are in a tough spot, Ovid is a good companion. He offers his hand to you. He wants to continue to be read, he says, and so if you’re reading him, you are offering him your hand back in his isolation. Through history, yes, but maybe time can run in more than one direction somehow. At least in the pages of books.

I decided when I was staring at the sea in Tomis that I would take his book back to Rome, which is what he asks his friends to do. I did. I went overland by train, from Tomis to Bucharest, from Bucharest to Budapest, to Vienna, to Munich, to Milan to Rome. I got up on the morning of the last day in Rome with a headache and nonetheless walked at dawn up to the top of a hill to bring the book back to the house of Augustus. I read one of the poems out loud in front of the house, and I felt I had done my best by the ghost of Ovid.

He’s still my friend, and now I feel that maybe I am his friend too.

That’s books. They are the only way to have friends through history. They are the way we find companionship with people we could never otherwise have met. I have themed this week’s reading recommendations to Ovid, in a way, in honour of our friendship.

If you don’t know what this is about, or you don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about the different tracks, go and read this post first. TLDR is that we are doing an eight-week program to get our reading fitness back, like a couch to 5K for reading.

• Track one is for people who are quite time poor and would ideally be reading 20 minutes a day or thereabouts.

• Track two is for people who are aware that they are spending too much time scrolling on the internet and want to grab some of that time back for reading, and they feel they would like ideally to be reading 20 to 60 minutes a day.

• Track three is for people who are reading fine but are aware that they are steering themselves away from the harder material and want some encouragement to work on the tough stuff.

You are NEVER BEHIND. The world of books is always waiting for you, and the comments on week one are always open (as are the comments on this post actually, because it has the BBC interview so it’s free). If you’ve tried and then forgot about it for a few days, just go back to 10 minutes of reading a day from week one. I would love to hear from you, particularly in the comments on this post, if you’re starting right now. I’m looking forward to a good August of reading.

Right, with that: here are this week’s assignments.

• every day means ‘most days of the week’. Aim for every day but don’t panic if you miss one. Just do it as soon as you remember.

• you are very much encouraged to do a rules-modification on any of my suggestions if you know that something else will work better for you

• we have reader-designed trackers! a google doc digital one here, and a printable paper one here

Every day: read for 20 minutes, either as two lots of 10 minutes or in one go. This is a loping-along pace I think, something one could keep up forever even in a busy life or a tough season. You’re reading 2 hours and 20 minutes a week, which gets you through about a novel a fortnight. This is a good maintenance level and you should feel proud of having got here. (We’re going further, but this is good.)

We probably don’t need to be aiming for things we can definitely finish in a week anymore, but just for the heck of it and because we’re in Ovid Week, why not read Kafka’s Metamorphosis? (In honour of the Metamorphoses, you see.) It’s just insanely good - like Ovid both weird and also really funny. A man wakes up one morning and finds he’s some sort of insect. It could be a metaphor for all sorts of things - the ways that we try to keep our dignity while our life is being destroyed, what we think we truly are, just the weirdness of being alive. Do, do enjoy.

Every day: read for 25 min a day, either as a ten-minute session and a fifteen-minute one or in one go. You can do this, it’s not much more than you were doing last week but it’s also really solid now - two good chunks in the day, getting momentum into your reading.

Plus: plan in two additional longer reads of 30 and 45 minutes. A lunchbreak and an evening, let’s say. Two chunks on the two days of the weekend. This is how we build it into our lives forever. You’re reading just over four hours this week. I reckon you could finish… Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. How on earth is this related to Ovid, Naomi? WELL. First of all it is about an exile - a police officer is laid up in hospital after an accident. Lying on his back with nothing much to do, the man of action is out of his element. His friend brings him some interesting portrait postcards to look at (this is the kind of thing people did before smartphones!) And the second reason it’s related to Ovid is because it’s about an unsolveable historical mystery: who killed The Princes In the Tower. Inspector Grant has a good go at working it out from his hospital bed and the conclusions are very convincing. This book is pure pleasure.

Additional activity: first of all, if you haven’t done it yet, start lightly to think about what day or two days toward the end of August you could devote to reading a whole book. Start pondering it, arrange some childcare or block it out in your diary if you need to. We’re not going to do this often, just give yourself the treat of it.

And also, try this: do some household task this week without any distraction, every time you do it. Pick something you’re going to do more than once. Loading the dishwasher with no podcast on. Folding laundry without the radio. Walk to the station in the morning without an audiobook. Totting up the takings from the speakeasy without a record of a crooner playing. Just try it this week. You don’t have to do it forever. Just see how it feels to allow a bit of extra space into your mind for your thoughts to just happen. See if you like it. And let me know, if you do or if you don’t!

Every day: read for 35 minutes a day. Oooh this is a lovely good chunk. That’s a great lunchbreak or early evening every day. or if you break it up, maybe 15 mins first thing and then 20 mins at lunch and you’re motoring.

Plus: plan in three longer reads, each one forty-five minutes. That’s three nice evenings when you get the dinner on and then sit down and read while something cooks, or two weekend afternoons and one weekday evening. I love to hear how it’s fitting in.

And in addition:

• right, this is the time to start deciding about whether you want to do a big ambitious read this summer. Middlemarch? War and Peace? Anna Karenina? Moby Dick? The Power Broker? Those are all so so so worth it, and you could definitely polish one of them off before the end of August, especially with a chunky 300-page stint coming at the end of the month (although tbh if you’re doing the 300-page stint my recommendation would probably be not to do it all on your big ambitious book, but maybe keep the last 150 pages for it?)

• you don’t have to do a big ambitious book but my advice if you choose to is the following. You have four weeks. Look at the number of pages in the book. Divide it by four. That’s how many you’re reading each week. If it’s a 1,000-page book that’s 250 pages a week which already feels more manageable. Then divide by seven and that’s how many pages you’re reading every day. Write it down. You could make yourself a little wallchart (I have really done this). If you do more in one day that’s obviously fine. If you’re falling behind you have your longer sessions each week to catch up - or you can ask yourself whether you really want to keep reading this book. If there’s a section that’s boring you rigid, you can skim it until you get to the next good bit. Do let us know in the comments what you’re thinking.

• like track 2, block out a day or two toward the end of August for your big 300-page read.

Your additional enrichment activity is simple: I want you to think of a text that you’ve always fancied reading, but every time you’ve just ended up bouncing off it. And your assignment is: read just five pages of it really slowly. Make some notes. Notice individual word choices. What clues is it giving you about what’s coming up? Do the five pages like it’s the whole thing. There’s no such thing as a book we have to read but I think it’s nice not to feel afraid of or aversive to anything. And sometimes slowing down is how to get to like something.

If you liked this post do give it a like, it helps other people find it. I send out a letter about something that’s interesting me most Sundays, I am wilfully unpredictable but this post will give a sense of what I’m like. Fundamentally, I am in favour of thinking. I know.

There are extra reading suggestions in here for paid subscribers, to say thank you - you are paying for me to work on this for everyone. This week’s reading suggestions are themed to Ovid and include my thoughts on the best Ovid translations to start with, a brilliant memoir of an impossible love affair, and a screamingly funny book about being a ghost writer.