New Ways of Reading
by Nancy Jane Moore
In mid-December 2024, I embarked on a reading practice unlike any I have ever done before: reading for about 15-30 minutes every day, usually in the morning, and making notes or writing down quotations from what I read. The motivation for the practice was to give myself a period of sitting quietly after doing exercises before checking my blood pressure, but it soon became something I loved on its own, a new way of reading.
Certain kinds of books lend themselves to this sort of practice. I began with Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, which is a great example of the perfect book: beautifully written (and/or translated, since Rovelli writes in Italian), philosophical, and complex. You really don’t want to read more than a few pages, or at most a chapter, because there’s so much to think about in the book.
Most novels do not lend themselves to this kind of reading practice. If you get really engaged with a story, you don’t want to stop reading. Rather you need books that make you want to stop and digest what you just read instead of ones where you have to know what happens next.
I went to a program in the fall where Jenny Odell was interviewing Cory Doctorow and got to talking to the people sitting next to me before the presentation. They had never heard of Jenny, so I waxxed enthusiastic about her most recent book, Saving Time, and explained that it was the perfect book to read for a short period every day. One of them observed that it was “a very specific recommendation.”
And it is, because I have tried reading some of the books that were best for this practice the same way I read a novel, and it didn’t work well. They are not meant to be read straight through at one sitting.
Poetry is well-suited for this practice. One of the books I read was Jean Le Blanc’s Field Guide to the Spirits, an Aqueduct Conversation Piece. I’m sure I’d looked through it before, but reading poetry is so different from reading fiction. Read several poems – maybe read each one several times or even out loud – and then stop.
Rebecca Solnit’s books are also perfect for daily reading. I read both her recent essay collection No Straight Road Takes You There and her older Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
I did read some more reportorial non-fiction as part of this practice, including Ed Yong’s wonderful book on the way animals (including humans) sense the world, An Immense World, but in general I tended toward books that I would define as philosophical – not as works of official philosophy, mind you, which as I learned from reading Solnit are more about arguing with other philosophers – but philosophical writing, the sort of books that both Solnit and Odell write.
The other reading activity I did this year that was different from my usual pattern was to read for the 100 notable small press books list that was recently published on Lit Hub. [https://lithub.com/100-notable-small-press-books-of-2025/] I was reading science fiction and fantasy for this list, which included many genres, and was allowed to recommend three books for the final list.
My choices were Nisi Shawl’s Making Amends, Theodora Goss’s Letters From an Imaginary Country, and Margaret Killjoy’s The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. I read many other good books as well; it was hard to narrow it down to three. You can find my capsule reviews on the Lit Hub page.
It interested me to discover that my favorite books were collections (though Nisi’s is a collection of connected stories that make a novel on its own). I haven’t been reading as much short fiction in recent years and I think I had forgotten how vital it is to the science fiction and fantasy genres.
I wanted to participate in this list because I normally read a number of small press books and, like Miriam Gershow, who organized the project, feel like they’re all too often overlooked in “best of” lists. I don’t think I’ll do it again, in part because I’d rather read a little more randomly. They are seeking readers for next year, however, and I recommend the practice.
One of my very favorite books of the past year was Pat Murphy’s The Adventures of Mary Darling, which does a fabulous job of challenging and reimagining Peter Pan and raising interesting questions about Sherlock Holmes as well. Since this was published by Tachyon Publications, it qualified for the 100 small press list, but given that I am in a writing group with Pat and even rated a mention in the acknowledgements section of the book, I could not honorably consider it.
However, one of the joys of this report for Aqueduct is that I can freely recommend books by friends and fellow writers from workshops without a shred of guilt, which brings me to another one, or, in fact, a series: Madeleine Robins’s Sarah Tolerance books. She reissued the first three books this year along with a fourth: The Doxies Penalty.
Many people know that I am fond of swordswomen, so it is perhaps not a surprise that I would take to the adventures of a young woman with a sword in Regency England. But I recommend these books even if you care nothing for a good swordfight or the era. Madeleine has tweaked the Regency period just enough to make these alternate history, and they are also good mysteries with compelling characters and complex stories.
They also make excellent comfort reading in our exceedingly complicated times. Start with the first one, Point of Honour.
I read a great deal of nonfiction at all times. My favorite this year was Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, which completely destroys the silly dreams of the broligarch crowd. Becker is an astrophysicist and a science writer, and takes apart such absurd notions as living on Mars and the singularity, not to mention so-called AI, in devastating ways.
Becker himself reads science fiction, but, unlike the people he is writing about, he comprehends that the genre is not intended to inspire people to invent the torment nexus or develop a dystopia. If you regularly run into people who rave about AI and the broligarch future, this is the book for you.
Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer is another important book, especially if one lesson you learned from the pandemic was that good indoor air quality can keep us from constantly sharing respiratory viruses. Zimmer dug into the history of studying the air we breathe in schools and crowded spaces, and provides clear detail of what needs to be done.
As someone who carries around a CO2 meter – the level of CO2 in a room gives you a good indication of whether you are likely to breathe the lung exhalations of others – and wears a mask when that level starts climbing to about 800, I greatly appreciated Zimmer’s careful analysis of what should be – and can be – done.
I grew up reading a daily newspaper and have always loved magazines. Although I still pick up the occasional print newspaper (and read others online) and subscribe to New Scientist (which piles up around here way too fast), I have ended up with subscriptions to various kinds of online publications these days, including both individual newsletters and nonprofit or collectively owned publications.
Two of the publications I subscribe to are national, even international at times: ContrabandCamp, which covers Black issues, and The Flytrap, which is feminist. Otherwise, I’ve just started reading two new publications in my area: Coyote and Oakland Review of Books. And I keep up with local news from Oaklandside.
My most indispensible newsletters are those from Rebecca Solnit, who is capable of being positive about the current chaos without being foolish, and Dave Karpf, who reads some very bad books by tech broligarchs and skewers them beautifully. I couldn’t read those books, but it’s important to know what those people think and why they’re wrong.
It is possible that I am getting a skewed view of the world, for which I am very thankful.
Nancy Jane Moore is the author of three Aqueduct books – Changeling, The Weave, and For the Good of the Realm – along with a lot of short stories and a small but growing quantity of poems. She is currently working on the sequel to For the Good of the Realm, which is finally shaking out. She blogs weekly at the Treehouse Writers blog. [https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/] Lately she has been contributing to the work of Unbreaking [https://unbreaking.org/] by digging into relevant litigation. Otherwise she can be found walking around her Oakland, California, neighborhood in the company of many local crows.
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