Where do you go to read?
There’s probably a chair or couch in your home where you read, but I’m talking about when you go somewhere to read. Out of personal preference or because homes can be chaotic or lonely, is there somewhere you go?
I’ve keenly felt the loss of a place to read during the pandemic. We lost not only our workplaces, but also that “third space”—not work, not home—so critical for civil society. But on the eve of opening up businesses in Ontario, it has struck me: Of the places I used to go to read, none of them were actually quite right for reading.
I might set out for a café and perch at a table, but the moment my ear picked up a train of conversation around me, those words would continue to cycle through my phonologic loop as a source of low-level stress until, exasperated, I would leave. Park benches relied on temperature (see: Canadian winters), shade, wind conditions and no precipitation.
Looking around, I see we have a problem with reading deserts in North America, especially in the suburbs. There’s just nowhere quiet and well-lit with ergonomic seating that can accommodate study, contemplation and reading. Political climate aside, can we really claim to be a culture that reveres literacy? Canada’s blockbuster bookstore chain opened with plenty of seating for reading and then quietly removed it all within a couple of years. I don’t know the reason, but I’m guessing it became a day shelter and they decided it was a bad look to have people sleeping there.
Access to a university is your best bet for these spaces, but that infrastructure relies on people paying extortionate tuition fees, and public access is limited. You could take out a membership to a co-work space, but the ones around here are all about ‘collaboration’, so conversation is encouraged, and anyway, cracking the spine of a fiction book in the middle of a roomful of striving startup workers feels a bit like strolling into the office in swim trunks and a snorkel.
When I tell people I would love to live in a place that sets up beautiful spaces to read, they invariably say: “That sounds a lot like a public library.” Does it, though? Not where I live.
For one thing, public libraries are not particularly safe. The Toronto Public Library system, the busiest urban library system in the world, saw violent incidents more than double between 2011 and 2018. And staff surveys show most people don’t feel it’s a safe work environment. Didn’t young kids used to hang out alone in libraries for hours and hours while their parents were off doing other things? Did I imagine that? I can’t imagine doing that now, not in my city.
There’s also very little good seating and the lighting is pretty fluorescent. It’s not about books anymore, anyway. It’s about booking a computer so you can job search, and all of those excellent services libraries now provide that have nothing to do with the life of the mind. Libraries serve crucial roles (I recommend Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, a biography of the Los Angeles Public Library system), but they don’t do this one thing well anymore, and honestly I don’t need to be surrounded in serviced stacks to do my studying and reading – typically, I bring my own books.
If you were white and male and moneyed, there used to be reading rooms for you in social clubs where they would set out the newspaper after having ironed it for you. You would smoke a pipe and read and try to look posher than the next guy. I once tried to attend an event at one of these places in London—a private event where I had a role to play—and was denied admittance because my shoes were deemed to be designed for sport.
But I maintain the overall concept is sound and could be implemented much more inclusively. The proof is in the popularity of the Quiet Car on the train. How glorious it is to have loud cell phone talkers shushed for you and shamed into the corridor by the culture of the place. To have signage saying things to your fellow passengers you would never dare utter.
The Quiet Car is heaven to me, but why do I have to be hurtling across the countryside to get a decent focus going? I seriously considered setting up a business that does that one thing well—provides wonderful spaces for study and reading, preferably scaling so that there’s somewhere like that in every big box store complex. It could change the whole culture to have visible places where that’s valued. But what if it turns into my privatizing public library functions? How deplorable, no thanks.
For now, I’ll do what everyone else does. I’ll read without community. I’ll study without the solidarity of fellow amateur scholars. I’ll be a solitaire, clearing the landing strip in the jungle in case one day a future generation decides that the written word is worthwhile after all.
I’ve often thought that a restaurant called Hush would do well. Just a café or light-meal place, with no talking permitted, orders taken by pointing to a very simple menu, and a total ban on sound from devices. The economics would be a bit difficult, though, as many would want to order something cheap and then stay for hours. A per-hour charge, if modest, could make it work. I won’t say it’s a slam-dunk business model, but it’d be worth a try. Every other restaurant, bar, and café has been getting steadily more deafening by the year.
In college, I often read in a small space off a back stairwell of my dorm that someone had thoughtfully outfitted with a desk, wooden chair, armchair, & two kinds of lamp. More of a hallway than true study, every once in a while someone would barge through with their own load of books or sporting equipment, and I loved those small interruptions. The surprise of the door opening, the wordless exchange, the way in which whoever it was just moved on to their own next thing as I turned the pages of some inscrutable text.