There Is No Comfortable Reading Position

Summary

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For the 10th year in a row, my New Year’s resolution is to read more books. Ideally, as I tend to tell myself during these protean early weeks of January, 2026 will be remembered for languorous evenings on the couch, tearing through the inventory of novels that crowd the modest capacity of my living-room shelves, perhaps with a tumbler of scotch resting on a coaster. I revel in the fantasy—I dream about finally cracking open A Confederacy of Dunces, or knocking out the last two entries of the Broken Earth trilogy, or making time for that Patti Smith memoir that I bought more than a decade ago. If I’m really feeling myself, I contemplate aiming even higher. Tolstoy? Pynchon? I mean, there’s also that copy of The Pale King that has been steadily yellowing on my coffee table for quite some time now. And yet, I already know how this saga is going to end. The year will draw to a close with a piddling number of new entries to my Goodreads, hopelessly incongruous with the size of my bibliophilic ambitions. Ask me why I never seem to read as much as I like, and I could gesture toward the well-worn afflictions of modernity—ballooning screen time, addictive algorithms, frayed attention spans. But one of my fundamental issues with literature is far more prosaic. In fact, I think it’s much more common than anyone would like to admit. Why is it that no matter what I do, I can never get comfortable while reading a book? Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. This is a species-wide affliction. The first published novel in history is widely considered to be The Tale of Genji, a courtly drama written in the late 11th century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. A millennium since her wondrously mind-expanding invention, humanity has somehow yet to conceive an ergonomically sound way to consume the written word. I, like you, have lain fla...