On reading versus living

A guest essay by Ochuko Akpovbovbo on why she's trying to read less

I’m excited to commission more guest essays this year. The ambition is two-fold: to expand this letter beyond my own reading and and to introduce the readers to great new writers that I think you should know about. For my first commission of the year, I asked super-reader Ochuko Akpovbovbo, the gimlet-eyed scribe behind As Seen On, to write an essay for me on why she wanted to read less. A provocative sentiment! But Ochuko writes thoughtfully and movingly about when reading slides from refuge to replacement — something I continue to navigate myself. I hope you enjoy her piece.

Excitingly, Ochuko’s going to be popping up a lot more round here! Starting on the 15th February (and from thereon the 3rd Saturday of every month) we will be publishing a cross-post between Books+Bits and As Seen On, called 2 Girls 1 Book: a written conversation between Ochuko and I, for our paying subscribers, on a new book that everyone is chattering about, or that we think they should be chattering about. Ochuko and I have been Whatsapping about books for a while now. We’re so excited to bring some of our chats, to you!

For those of you who want to get a jump on our chat: February’s book is The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, about a young Palestinian woman who gets caught up in a scheme selling fake Birkins.

---

I am a lifelong reader. By that, I mean, I’ve always loved books and am inclined to read them as often as I can. Being a determined and focused person, ‘as often as I can’ has turned out to mean, ‘an awful lot’. For the last two years, I’ve spent at least 3 hours each day with my nose in a book, clocking in a morning shift, a midday shift, and an evening shift, reading the same amount of hours per day that the average person spends on their phone.

I love it — obviously, or I wouldn’t do so much of it — but there is also another truth: for me, reading has always been interwoven with loneliness, and longing, and stillness. A way to hit pause on my own story when I couldn’t find a narrative thread worth holding onto. I sometimes fear that if I were completely and blissfully happy, I wouldn’t read at all.

One of the most common new year’s resolutions, extolled all over social media, is to read more. My 2024 resolution, however, was to read less. Things had gotten, shall we say, a little out of hand. Like I was reading more than I was living. In 2023, I had logged 164 read books on my StoryGraph account. These were all books I owned, paperbacks and hardbacks arranged neatly in my shoddily assembled IKEA bookcase, right beside my shoddily assembled IKEA bed. I’d wake up each morning and the first thing I’d see would be BOOKS! I seldom picked a book at random. Each month, I’d put down 12 books on my Notes app — a mix of lengths, genres, lightness, and heaviness — carefully curated to deliver the perfect reading month.

12 books works out at roughly 3 books a week. I’d recently moved to a new country and to a dull city, where I knew no one. My new job was strictly 9-5, leaving me with a baffling amount of free time on my hands. I started a Bookstagram account, something I'd been wanting to do for months. At the end of each month, like everyone else, I’d do a reading recap: a small tower of books aesthetically displayed against some sunlit backdrop.

In January last year, I read 22 books, a close runner up to the month before when I read 24. I remember taking the pictures for Instagram, writing the caption, all the while wondering: where did I find the time to do all this reading? I thought about the bus rides I’d spent nose in a book, ignoring my coworker beside me, and the get-togethers I’d left early because I wanted to get through those extra 50 pages. I recalled the times I’d decided not to go out at all. For the first time in over a year of reading this way, I felt self-conscious.

How much reading is too much reading? For the first time ever, I had to stop and wonder. If there’s an upper limit to how much you can read before someone says, that’s too much, I haven’t found it yet. Being young and largely free of responsibility, I guess it's one of the more ‘edifying’ ways I could spend my time. Who dares fault a young woman for expanding her mind? A lot of people ascribe a moral superiority to those who always have a book in hand, regardless of the reader’s motivations. Because I read, I am thoughtful, erudite, cerebral, empathetic, cultured — all manner of things that may or may not be true. Far too few people bother to ask: What have you given up? Whose calls have you not returned? Whose invite did you turn down? And most importantly: Why do you read… so much?

Growing up in Lagos, I read because I was lonely. I read because there were things whispered all around me, things no one would tell me, and I sought to have secrets of my own. Between the ages of 16 and 23, I rarely read, believing there was no narrative that could trump the revelry of the life I now lived. For the life of me, I could never be still. I was walking, talking, dancing, laughing. I’d try to pause, to trace words with my eyes, but always, there would be some small incursion on my mind, some excitement that needed to be expelled. I’d close the book and jump out of bed. After all, what are words when there is life!

But that was then. Books, once a crutch for a lonely childhood, became a crutch for a lonely period of my adulthood. A year out of college, I left the city I had come to love, my boyfriend and closest friends in one part of the globe, my family, another, and flew across the world for a new job, in a city where I knew no one. My flat became a colourful sanctuary from the grey Nuremberg skylines, and in it I would read, and read, and read some more.

And then, one year ago, that first jolt of apprehension at the voracity of my reading. At 24 years old, books were beginning to stand not for freedom, but for loneliness. Books were keeping me static. Where had my zest for adventure, my yen for movement, gone? I did not want to equate books with loneliness, with lethargy, with avoidance. I did not want to walk into a library, a bookstore, and mourn the time I’d lost.

So in February, I read 11 books. In March, I read 3. In April, I read 8. Still a lot of books for the average person, but crucially, not for me. I went out more, stayed out later, had a few stilted conversations with strangers on the bus — but soon gave that up. Buses are made for books, you can’t argue with that. It was in those months that I conceived my newsletter. Slowly pulled back into the reality of my life, I began to want things that drove my own plot forward. After gorging on so much talent and creativity, I now had a renewed desire to tap into my own.

It wasn’t until I started reading less that I had time to reflect on how much reading had changed me. My inner narrative had a new voice — more poetic, rhythmic in its flow. I had new words to describe my feelings and new shapes in which I could express my thoughts. Another truth still: you must give yourself space to respond to stimuli. To notice what you’ve learned, and decide what to do with it. We all need time to breathe. It turns out that books are no different.

I will admit that there was a part of me that missed all that reading. After all, there is safety in being locked into a story that isn’t yours. To utilise every single speck of time. In the months after I started writing — the sometimes dreadful, always isolating act of putting pen to paper and willing your mind to conjure up the words to say what you mean — I stopped reading almost entirely, fearing that to pick up a book again would prove too strong a temptation and I’d have to start this process all over.

It wasn’t until last summer, when I’d got into a rhythm with my writing, that I felt confident to start reading again. My boyfriend, who I’d met when books were a thing of my lonely past — who’d had no idea of my capacity for reading for the first 6 months that we dated — had watched, in muted awe, as it became the only thing I wanted to do. When I stopped reading, he knew better than to question it. He, too, wanted me to embrace my present a little more. But when I started reading again, he said to me I missed watching you read. You always look so focused, but happy. Sometimes you chuckle out loud and I’m not even sure you notice. He was right. I was happy. I didn’t feel self-conscious anymore. I knew I was not draining books of all their energy. I was meeting them with my own.

In 2024, I read 124 books, exactly 40 less than I did the year before. My life hasn’t changed completely — there’s only so much a city like Nuremberg will allow for — but it’s changed enough. A re-balance was needed, but the fact remains that there are still few things that give me more pleasure than a good book. I brush off gatherings to lie in bed with a really good book, and more than once, I’ve skipped a newsletter because I was too engrossed in a story to think my own thoughts.

So yes, I fear that if I were completely and blissfully happy, I wouldn’t read at all. But I also fear that without my precious books, I could never be completely and blissfully happy. The answer, I have found, is to know when to close the book, and take on the mantle of this thing called life.