The Future Of this Newsletter
Some Housekeeping + A Bit of A Rant
Suppose you received this email, congratulations. You’re now among the first gang of lucky subscribers to get access to the REMASTERED version of this newsletter.
I apologise in advance for the absurd length of this first issue. We have a lot to cover so let’s get to it.
Long story short, after weeks of backend web development headaches and countless dollars poured into this upgrade, we’ve just migrated from Substack to this concoction of beautifully designed newsletters, clean navigation and (most importantly) a Zen garden away from the kicking and screaming happening around the Notes section on Substack.
Many factors convinced me to move MOI (brilliant acronym from one of the subscribers) from Substack to my personal newsletter, and the biggest one has something to do with that D word.
DISTRACTION.
I don’t think I’m the only one on Substack who inadvertently ended up on the hedonic treadmill:
I write -> I write about writing -> I write about writing on Notes -> I read about other people writing about writing on Notes -> WTF is going on?
I’m not even gonna go into Substack’s hidden algorithm and all the weird shit you’ll find on there nowadays. In short, Substack now is Latin for two D words: Distraction and Disorder
Granted, it might be great for email marketers and certain kinds of writers like journalists and critics. But for people who want to offer concentrated value, the platform is simply distracting users from the one thing they’re supposed to do. READ.
I recently received an email from (the dawg) Scott Galloway’s No Mercy / No Malice and it was the final nail in the coffin for me to make the switch. Scott’s newsletter was one of the best things I’ve ever read and it was so pleasant to navigate. No Notes, no people forcing paid subscriptions down your throat. Nothing but a good read via email.
I enjoyed my time on Substack and I’ve gathered some of the most engaged and intelligent subscribers, but it’s time to move on, improve and recommit to why I started a newsletter in the first place:
To write and offer value, one letter at a time.
And speaking of which, let’s talk about that.
Introducing: The 1-2-Read Newsletter
Let me make it crystal clear so you can decide whether or not to click UNSUBSCRIBE after reading this email.
We’re living through a crazy period in history where there has been a documented decline in literacy rates. A recent column in The Financial Times revealed that among the 31 countries that were surveyed, 13 countries experienced a fall in the literary proficiency of their educated adults.
Similar stories also made their way through Higher Education. I recently commented on the article by The Atlantic which documented that students from elite colleges are now struggling to finish assigned readings.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom regarding the future of reading, even though all of us could perhaps remember a time when reading delighted us. So instead of focusing on what’s wrong, I choose to focus on making sense of this literacy crisis while finding out what we can do about it.
And this is where this newsletter comes in. Once every two weeks, I will send out a newsletter with the following structure:
1-2-Read.
1 stands for one big idea. Some weeks I will report on the latest articles regarding this literacy crisis while other weeks I will lean on my research experience in literary theory. The point here is to curate a substantial idea for you to think about for the next two weeks.
2 stands for two practical actions. After understanding the problem, let’s focus on the solutions. This section of the newsletter will offer you one journaling prompt to reframe your mindset regarding reading and the second prompt will give you a life experiment to put the big idea into practice.
Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading our fortnightly email, you’ll have a deep understanding of our literacy crisis while having the tools to counteract some of the detriments.
Sounds good? Let’s begin.
Issue #1
(1) The Idea: We Need To Let Books Find Us
My first job after I finished high school was selling books and every bookseller knows about the December blackout period.
This is that rare period of the year when you’ll be offered more shifts than you’ve asked for. During certain weeks leading up to Christmas, our manager would black out the roster which meant: no time off, no non-essential leaves and no getting out of shifts.
As tiring as this period was, it was mostly busy work. My role was predictable: direct customers to what they wanted and wrap up books after checkout. Chances are, our customers have already looked up what they wanted to buy on Amazon or Google. We just happened to stock what they wanted locally.
But during a normal workday outside of that blackout period, the work was somehow more demanding. Sometimes people would wander in without knowing what they wanted.
They would spend hours browsing without committing to a single book and we typically call this class of customers floaters. And the worst among them would finish an entire book at the bookshop without paying for it.
In retrospect, as annoyed as I was as a bookseller, I had to admit that those customers were onto something.
According to some recent data collected by YouGov, people who preferred to order books online overshadowed people shopping locally by 10%. And even among those who bought books in person, most had already decided which book to buy.
The set of people who evaded the statistics are those who wandered around for hours without buying anything. Their purchasing decisions could not be mapped based on sales alone because they understood that it isn’t always about picking up a book we already want. Sometimes there’s serious value in letting a book find you by spending hours in a bookshop.
Attunement: The Strange Moment When A Book Grips Us
Just like how wandering around a bookshop cannot be captured by statistics, literary theory also has a hard time capturing this strange emotion of a book suddenly gripping you as you fly through the pages against your will.
We’ve all felt it. For me, the most recent example was Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. The first few lines made my heart race and I had to finish it in one sitting. You can also bring to mind a book like this with ease.
The tricky thing when we start to bring emotions into literature is that we risk sounding too subjective. Literary critics prize themselves in being the neutral arbiters of taste while holding any sentimentality at the door. But if we’re completely honest with ourselves, if literature fails to captivate, nourish and shock us emotionally, what good does it serve?
One of the most daring writers who tackled the emotional dimension head-on is Rita Felski. In her book Hooked: Art and Attachment, she gave this sudden bond with a book a name:
ATTUNEMENT
For Felski, attunement happens when a piece of artwork suddenly gets through to us. We are “gripped by the strength of a felt connection” as the artwork (a novel, a painting, a film) possesses us completely.
It’s also really difficult to explain this absorbed state to anyone else. When people ask us why we love a certain book or a movie, we’ll fumble for words and come up with something vague.
Though some will make up some rational reason for loving something in retrospect, we still can’t escape the fact that attunement escapes any reasonable justification and we can’t force it to happen by will. In fact, sometimes forcing ourselves to love a book will make us hate it.
It hits us out of the blue when our environment, memories and moods are all tuned into a book. It’s that afternoon when the dogs stop barking when the dew on the grass has dried and we’re just in a relaxed mind space for a book to work its magic on us.
Do Not Ignore This Special Feeling
I’m willing to put forth a thesis here: most of our reading troubles usually come from not being attuned to a book.
There’s always a list telling us to read better novels and recite intricate poems. But if our love for language is squandered in the process, there will be nothing left.
This is one of my grievances with literary criticism. For a long time, critics tried to set up objective hierarchies for how good a book is without asking how attuned the readers are. This is how we ended up with shelves of brilliant books no one wants to read because the critics are too stern and the readers are too guilty.
Likewise, if we ignore the role attunement plays in our reading practices, we’ll start to believe that reading is a chore and that it’s no longer possible for a book to grip us. We’ll live forever in the shadows of those books we’re supposed to enjoy instead of meeting ourselves where we are.
Felski closed the chapter with the observation:
“[Attunement] can work within yet also against the pressures of education, class, and culture.”
In a sense, we can be suddenly attuned to anything and there is no point denying what we like. So instead of forcing attunement on books we’re supposed to love, why don’t we seek attunement from books we already love and use that to fuel our reading and see where it’ll lead us?
(2) The Prompts:
1: Describe three instances when something (a film, a novel, etc.) gripped you completely. Where were you? Who were you with? How did it feel and when did you know that you’re attuned to it? Pay close attention to the feeling without disregarding it as subjective or silly.
2: Go wander around a bookshop. Forget Amazon. Forget bestsellers. Head down to a local bookshop and pick a dozen books off of the shelves. Ask: what captures my attention? Why do I like it? Am I willing to keep reading? And whenever you find a book you can’t put down, voila, you have just rediscovered attunement.
