Things to Read When Your Brain Is Done

For when you want something more interesting than scrolling, but War and Peace is absolutely not happening

There are evenings when I genuinely want to read but seem to have temporarily lost the ability to do it. I open a book, read half a page, realise I have absorbed absolutely none of it and go back to the beginning. Three paragraphs later, I am thinking about whether there is milk in the fridge and have no idea who Charlotte is or why she is suddenly furious with Daniel.

At that point, I usually assume I am too tired to read. I am not sure that is always true, sometimes I am simply too tired to read that.

There is quite a difference between following a complicated novel with six important characters, two timelines and some unresolved family business from 1987, and reading ten pages about why people once hid shoes inside the walls of their houses. Both involve reading, but one may stand considerably more chance of getting through the front door of my brain at nine o'clock at night.

That distinction has saved a lot of perfectly good books from being unfairly abandoned.

SOME READING ASKS MORE OF YOU

Reading looks like a restful activity because, physically, not much appears to be happening. You are sitting down, probably somewhere comfortable, moving your eyes across a page and occasionally turning it. Compared with most things we do during the day, it looks suspiciously easy.

There is considerably more going on underneath.

To follow a text, you have to hold on to what you have already read while making sense of what has just arrived. Characters, arguments, events and bits of information need to connect with one another, and complicated sentences can become much harder work when your attention is already wandering elsewhere.

Research into reading comprehension has consistently found a relationship between mind-wandering and how much we understand, while things such as interest, motivation and the demands of the text can influence how successfully we stay with it.

None of which will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever reached the bottom of a page and realised their eyes completed the journey entirely without them. The useful part is recognising that failing to concentrate on one book does not necessarily mean reading is finished for the evening. You can change the book before you change the activity.

AN OLD FAVOURITE HAS ALREADY DONE THE INTRODUCTIONS

Rereading gets a slightly unfair reputation, as though knowing what happens removes the point. I think knowing what happens can sometimes be precisely the point.

If you return to a familiar book, you do not need to meet everybody again, work out the rules of the world or wonder whether the seemingly irrelevant man introduced in chapter two is going to become extremely important 180 pages later. Some of the groundwork has already been done.

There is research behind this too. In one eye-tracking study using Shakespeare's sonnets, people read more fluently the second time and showed deeper comprehension of the poems on rereading. Another study found that rereading a favourite novel produced more nostalgia and a stronger sense of social connectedness than reading something unfamiliar.

That makes an old favourite quite a sensible thing to reach for when your brain has already done enough for one day.

It’s enjoyable returning to a book years later and discovering that you are no longer the same reader. I have reread things and wondered how I managed to miss an entire character, an obvious theme and, on at least one occasion, what now appeared to be the main point of the story.

I attended the first reading in body only.

SHORT DOES NOT MEAN SECOND BEST

I would much rather read something complete in fifteen minutes than spend forty minutes fighting with something simply because it looks more substantial.

A short essay, an old newspaper report, a letter, a diary entry, folklore, a peculiar historical event or the story of one person can give you somewhere interesting to go without requiring you to remain there for the rest of the week.

This is one of the things I love about archives and collections. You can briefly become fascinated by the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, Victorian mourning jewellery, a missing lighthouse keeper or the reason concealed shoes keep turning up inside old buildings, then close the page and continue with your evening.

You do not need to turn the interest into expertise.

There is a pressure now to make curiosity useful. If you become interested in something, perhaps you should read a whole book about it, listen to a podcast series, save six documentaries and emerge with an informed position. Or you could know one strange thing.

I am enormously fond of knowing one strange thing, and then annoying everyone with, ‘Did you know?’

It gives you the pleasure of discovery without turning curiosity into coursework.

FOLLOW THE QUESTION, NOT THE READING LIST

Sometimes the easiest way into reading is not choosing a book at all. It is choosing a question.

Why did people cover mirrors after somebody died? What did lighthouse keepers do all night? Where did the stories about changelings come from? At what point did someone decide that putting a dead cat inside a wall was an acceptable building decision?

A question gives your attention somewhere specific to go.

That feels very different from sitting down with the broad instruction that you really ought to read something. One sounds interesting; the other sounds suspiciously like homework.

This is also how an innocent ten-minute search can become an evening.

You begin by finding out why a superstition existed, which leads to a particular place, then a trial, then somebody involved in the trial turns out to have done something extraordinary in 1742 and before long you have six tabs open and no memory of why you originally picked up your phone.

I am completely comfortable with this form of losing track of time.

Interest matters when we read. Research into mind-wandering has found that topic interest and motivation are among the things associated with whether attention stays with a text, so following the thing that has genuinely caught your curiosity is not an entirely frivolous strategy.

Sometimes your tired brain is not refusing to concentrate, it just becomes much more selective about what deserves the effort.

GIVE ME A PERSON TO FOLLOW

There are evenings when facts bounce straight off me, but a story gets in without difficulty.

Narrative gives information a structure. There is somebody to follow, somewhere to go and usually some reason to wonder what happens next. Research on what psychologists call narrative transportation describes the experience of becoming absorbed in a story through attention, imagery and emotional involvement.

I think this is why I can struggle through a page explaining a historical system and then happily read several thousand words about one person living within it. Tell me how nineteenth-century night watchmen were organised and I may absorb some of it.

Tell me about the man walking through dark streets at three in the morning carrying a lantern, what he could hear, who he encountered and how he earned his living, and suddenly I want to know everything.

The history has not disappeared. If anything, it becomes easier to remember because there is somewhere to attach it.

This is one of the principles I want to keep running through The Midnight Archive. I do not want it to feel like arriving at a digital textbook where you are expected to begin at the top and dutifully work your way through.

I would much rather open a door.

There is a person, a place, an event or a creature on the other side, and the history can come with us once we are in.

DO NOT BLAME THE BOOK TOO QUICKLY

I have nearly abandoned books at night because they felt unbearably dense, only to pick them up the following afternoon and wonder what on earth my problem had been, nothing changed in the book. The reader did.

Attention wanders during reading far more often than we tend to notice, and research consistently links that wandering with reduced comprehension. Interest, familiarity, the complexity of the text and the mental resources we bring to it all play a part in how easily we can stay with what we are reading.

This is worth remembering before deciding that a book is boring, badly written or simply not for you. Sometimes it is and sometimes it is Wednesday and you have had enough.

There is no prize for forcing your way through another twenty pages while retaining absolutely none of them. Put the book down somewhere you can find it again and choose something that has a better chance tonight.

The serious novel will cope.

BUILD A TIRED-BRAIN SHELF

I like the idea of having a small collection specifically for evenings when you still want to read but concentration has become unreliable. Not the worthy books waiting for the improved future version of you, and probably not the enormous novel requiring a family tree, map and handwritten notes.

Things you can enter quickly. Short stories, essays, folklore, diaries, letters, memoir, strange history, an old favourite, a magazine you genuinely enjoy or a book you can open almost anywhere and find something interesting within a few pages.

It does not need to be a literal shelf either. Save a few articles. Bookmark a couple of websites. Keep a collection somewhere that does not require you to begin the evening by searching through several thousand possibilities.

This is essentially what I want The Midnight Archive to become.

Some nights you might arrive wanting a proper story and stay for an hour. On others, you may have enough concentration for ten minutes and choose whichever door looks interesting.

Behind one might be a night watchman walking the streets while everybody else sleeps. Behind another, a selkie leaving the sea, a haunted house, an old superstition, a concealed shoe or the unfortunate men whose employment involved collecting everybody else's waste after dark.

There is no order to them, just remember what you read last week or become knowledgeable enough to discuss Scottish folklore at dinner parties. Curiosity is enough.

Read until you have had enough, then stop. If you realise that you have read the same paragraph four times and still have no idea why Charlotte is furious with Daniel, perhaps your brain has made the decision for you. They can sort their own problems out until tomorrow.