The stack of books by the chair has been there since before Thanksgiving. Five books, all things I meant to read this winter, some bought new and some pulled off the shelf in a moment of resolve back in October. By mid-January I had not opened any of them. The stack had become a small monument to the gap between the reader I think I am and the reader I actually am.

Last week I finally touched it.

What Was in the Stack

I should say what was in it. A long history of a region I will probably never visit. A novel by an author I had liked once and meant to follow up with. A book of essays on natural history that someone gave me three years ago and I had been guilty about ever since. A book about a man who walked across a continent in the 1970s. And a book of poems I had been pulling out and reading from at random for a year without ever quite reading through.

What is interesting about a stack like this is that none of these books are bad. They are not the problem. The problem is that books, especially serious ones, ask for a kind of attention that the life around the chair has been refusing to give them. I have been reading, in a sense. I have been reading the news, the email, the short pieces that get sent to me. I have been reading the way the small phone in my pocket trains me to read, which is to say in pieces, jumping, never staying long enough in any one piece to feel it close in around me.

Why Books Need More Than We Give Them

A book is a different animal. A book wants thirty unbroken minutes at a minimum and ideally more. A book wants you to forget where you are. It will not give you anything if you read it the way you read everything else, which is in two-minute windows between other things. The stack had not been getting read because I had not been giving it the only thing it needed, which was time.

I started with the natural history essays because they were the shortest pieces and I thought they would be the easiest entry. They were not easy. They were dense. But within four pages I had stopped checking the time and within ten I had forgotten the phone was in the other room, and by the end of the first essay something in me had reset. The slowness of the prose had pulled my reading speed down to where the prose lived. I could feel my own attention rearranging itself around the page.

That was Saturday. I have now read three of the five books on the stack, partially or fully, and I have done it by doing only one thing. I put the phone in the kitchen at seven in the evening and I do not pick it up again until the next morning. The first night this was uncomfortable for about an hour. The second night I barely noticed. The third night I forgot to put the phone in the kitchen because I was already reading. The practice of reading for long stretches turns out to be something I can recover, if I take the obvious thing that broke it out of the room.

What Finally Worked

I do not think this is news. I am not the first person to figure out that the phone is the problem, and I have read at least three of the books that already say this. The difference between knowing it and doing it is the difference between the stack on the floor and the stack on the side table, which is now smaller by 3.

If you have a stack of your own, the only suggestion I have is to start by removing the thing in the room that is competing with the book. It will probably be the phone. It might be the television. It might be the easier evening habit you have built around either of them. Whatever it is, move it to another room for one evening and see what happens. The book is patient. It has been waiting since October. It will wait until you give it the only thing it has ever needed.

The stack is smaller now than it has been in months, and what is left no longer feels like a monument to anything I am failing at.