Whether we read for escape, for education, for edification, for inspiration – for any facet of our professional or recreational lives – perhaps there’s something doubly impossible about being in another ‘here’ when our real ‘here’ is so compact and so strange.

It’s an interesting thing to be a fiction writer – and a nonfiction editor – in a time of pandemic. As a novelist, I spent several years before I came to Griffith Review imagining a cataclysmically changed world – where planes were grounded; where people were kept apart – for a book I haven’t yet managed to complete. It’s an odd thing to live through the realisation of things you thought you were inventing.

On the nonfiction side, COVID-19 is the biggest of stories: who knows how it will intersect with all the stories people are already telling, how we’ll try to imagine where this literally viral story – unprecedented – might turn next. In Draw Your Weapons (2017), the American critical theorist and religion scholar Sarah Sentilles talks about ‘the embrace of unknowable otherness’, the kinds of writing that take us beyond empathy, outside of who and how and where and what we usually think we are. In many ways, the pandemic has delivered us into that unknowable otherness: it’s our job to imagine where we let that lead us, and how to navigate that way.

So how, in this time, should we think about reading?

I’ve found it a strangely hard thing to do in the context of where and how we are now – and that’s odd for me, given that reading underpins most of my working and non-working being. At first, I thought it might be because I fell into the camp of people with less time, rather than more, when the circumstances of work and home life changed. I wasn’t undertaking craft projects, or making gardens, or doing yoga and pilates, or plunging into the huge piles of leisure/pleasure/curiosity-reading books that accumulate beside my bed.

And I was probably envious of the people who were.

Reading emerged early as something many people were planning on doing during lockdown – which, as both an editor and a writer, was a satisfying thing to see. Australian booksellers experienced a spike in sales late March – evidence of people ‘stocking up, among other items, on books in preparation for isolated living,’ according to Nielsen BookScan. Books+Publishing noted that ‘Australia’s trade publishing market revenue for the week ending 28 March [was] up 15% on the same week last year, with the number of copies sold up 36% compared to the same time in 2019’. It was part of their own preparations for what Peter Rose, the editor of Australian Book Review, elegantly described as the move to ‘hunker down and live privately’.

So many different lists of recommended reading were assembled – in articles, interviews, podcasts, conversations – for people to carry into their own last-minute buying from bookshops or borrowing from libraries. People were turning to plague stories, reading or re-reading everything from The Decameron and Camus through to Geraldine Brooks’ Years of Wonders (2001) and Minette Walters’ The Last Hours (2017). Science fiction – utopias and dystopias – felt useful as well, as did history, ancient and modern.

Anything escapist, said some; anything true to life, said others.

Several outlets began to promote more poetry – readings, reprints, new works, podcasts – and it worked as a salve as much as a spur to read poets’ selections, to hear their words in their own voice. A straw poll of a handful of friends revealed many were re-reading Jane Eyre unbeknownst to each other – for Jane’s resilience, they said; for her fortitude.

In mid-April, when former Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke at the awarding of this year’s Stella Prize, she noted that the pandemic

has bolstered the power of literature. All over the world, people are drawing intellectual, emotional and spiritual nourishment from books. As our individual spaces become smaller, we are remembering how to exercise the imagination muscle of our childhoods, and using books and stories as an escape and as a comfort. We’re also relying on the written word to speak the truth to us when we are bombarded with information messaging and noise from across the world. And when we come out of the other side of this, we will rely on our artists and our writers to retell the many millions of individual stories of the crisis, and to distil its deeper truths.

I blamed my ambivalence about reading on the no-time I had to sit still and disappear into any new rafts of words.

*****

It’s mid-May now. And I realised this morning that part of the strange antipathy I feel about reading at the moment is that it’s often an isolated and insulated thing to do – in the best and most beautiful ways. We disappear from our own this-world into the other-world of a book.

The magic of this transportation – the suspension of all real-world existence, or the maintenance of some temporarily parallel state – makes me think of David Malouf’s description of reading Jane Eyre as a teenager, simultaneously inhabiting the world of his own Queensland summer holiday and the world of Jane’s ferociously cold despair:

What extraordinary creatures we are that we can be, on the same occasion, in two quite different places; and what a business reading is that fifty years after the event the landscape of Thornfield in the frost, as I first came up on it, is as present in my memory as the hot sands of Main Beach Southport and my own body under the blazing sun.

Is it that occupying our small this-worlds feels so tenuous at the moment that in each distinct bubble we’ve made for ourselves there’s less room to blow another bubble and step inside an other-place? Whether we read for escape, for education, for edification, for inspiration – for any facet of our professional or recreational lives – perhaps there’s something doubly impossible about being in another ‘here’ when our real ‘here’ is so compact and so strange. I wonder how many of those books stockpiled in March have formed new buttresses of unread piles next to other people’s beds – insurance for a time when this world feels safe enough again for us to think of stepping into other ones?

The May edition of the Australian Book Review delivered another range of recommended reading for these times – Jane Eyre features there too amongst all sorts of suggestions from all kinds of writers.

But the one that grabbed me came from the novelist Michelle de Kretser. ‘Since I don’t know you,’ she wrote

I can’t recommend reading that will comfort and sustain you through lockdown. I can’t say that I find any reading particularly soothing at present. Nevertheless, I’ve bought books in the last three weeks, and I encourage you to do the same. By ‘books’ I mean books by contemporary Australian writers. Like so many other people, writers are doing it tough. I’m okay: most are not. Literature is a small and vulnerable affair in this country. Further down the line, bookshops and publishing programs will take a hit. So please buy Australian books. Whether or not they help you, you’ll be helping others scrape through.

Perhaps this is the most important thing to say, against the precarity of every kind of enterprise that seeks to make meaning at the moment. To ask, please, invest in the idea of reading – no matter what you read or when or how or where; whether for work you’re doing or for something as far away from that as you can manage. Through that investment – in writers and their words as much as in your own thinking and imagination – you’ll support the making of the next new stories we’ll all need, in so many different ways.

Ashley Hay is a novelist and essayist. Her books include The Body in the Clouds, The Railwayman’s Wife, and A Hundred Small Lessons. Her work has garnered prizes including the Colin Roderick Prize, the People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Prize, and the Bragg/UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing. She is the editor of Griffith Review.

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