Reading without an algorithm

Notes from Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person Is the Only Self

A good contemporary essay collection will have you nodding along in agreement while also providing a new perspective. Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person Is the Only Self does exactly that. With contemporary life and literature woven together, I enjoyed every moment I spent with these essays across the two and a half weeks it took me to read them.

Gabbert writes well and knows a great deal. She has a particularly deep understanding of Plath, a writer I do not have much interest in, so I skipped those essays entirely. But I know how many people love Plath and would point those pieces towards them without hesitation. Gabbert also writes about her relationship to reading and to the pandemic. Some argue it is too soon to write about that period, and while I am not generally a fan of pandemic literature, Gabbert’s wit made those sections feel less like a document of apocalyptic times and more like a fond memory of an unexpected season for reading.

As with everything I read, I want to unpack my own thinking in conversation with hers.

On Recently Returned Books

The opening essay and my favourite easily. How Gabbert chooses what to read is genuinely revelatory.

“But the books on this shelf weren’t recommended by anyone. There was no implication they were vetted or approved by a librarian or even the last borrower. That’s what amazed me. They were just random books.”

Gabbert would choose books from the recently returned shelf at the library. No recommendation attached, no guarantee the previous reader loved it or hated it. Pure pot luck. It is also, as she points out, a wonderful way to encounter genres or authors you would never have considered otherwise.

“I liked how it reduced the scope of my options, but without imposing any one person’s taste or agenda upon me, or the generalized taste of the masses suggested by algorithms.”

I nodded at this line. Lately I have felt overwhelmed by options, by the sheer volume of recommendations circulating online. I am grateful for Substack recommendations, and some of the best things I have read have come via people I follow on X, but there are simply too many. Decision making is not my strong suit at the best of times. As a Libra I am constitutionally unsuited to it. My mum used to dread taking me to the bookshop as a child because I would stand there for an age deliberating. I still do now, though these days the deliberation is less about the book and more about whether I can justify the price at that particular moment.

But Gabbert is right about something important here. With every account we follow and every post we like, an algorithm takes shape. My reading taste is probably not purely my own at this point. It is an amalgamation of other people’s reading tastes, curated and fed back to me. A random shelf at the library might be one of the most personal reading experience left available to us.

Which does make me wonder: by writing about books on Substack, am I feeding the same algorithm I am trying to escape? Probably.

“Sometimes John goes to the bookstore alone and brings home something he thinks I might like, some book I’ve never heard of, a four-dollar risk, and it makes me happy. I need that in my life. I need randomness to be happy.”

Gabbert’s partner sounds like a dream, honestly. The one gap in my husband’s otherwise excellent gift giving is that he has never bought me a book. Though he does have a role in my reading life: sometimes I will ask him to choose from a selection I point out in a bookshop or I will show him my monthly Kindle list and ask him to pick one when my Libra brain cannot commit. That is about as random as my reading gets, although I did once code a next read chooser to select a book from my to be read list. The code is floating around somewhere.

Most people will admit to disliking randomness. They prefer a plan. But reading this essay I found myself agreeing with Gabbert. It is the small moments of randomness that make life bearable. Not anything dramatic, not getting made redundant or upending the norm, just going out for dinner instead of cooking, taking an unplanned walk to the park, picking up a book on a whim halfway through an otherwise structured reading month. I do that regularly. It helps.

The Stupid Classics Book Club

In this essay Gabbert writes about the book club she joined during the pandemic, dedicated to reading the classics she had never got around to and deciding whether they were actually worth it. One of the novels was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I read it at seventeen as part of a school project, during what I would describe as my dystopian phase. I had not looked into Bradbury much since then, and I did not realise until reading this that he was, by most accounts, not a good person.

“In Bradbury’s view of the universe, white men wrote good and important books, while ‘the minorities’ and ‘women’s libbers’ tried to censor them.”

If you are not familiar with the novel, Fahrenheit 451 is about a state that burns books as an act of censorship. The title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites. We tend to think of censorship as something those in power impose on those beneath them, as a tool of control directed downwards. Bradbury’s framing inverts this entirely, and I found it shocking. The idea that minorities could even occupy a position powerful enough to censor anyone requires a fairly extraordinary leap of logic.

“I find these lists incredibly tiresome. Of course, you don’t have to read anything. Some books will be insurmountably boring or make you deeply unhappy; there just isn’t enough time. But if you want to speak or write knowledgeably about them, you really do have to read them. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. I’m glad I read Fahrenheit 451 even though I despised it. Now I know exactly how it’s bad, and I can hate it for the right reasons.”

This passage sent me off on a tangent I have been sitting with ever since. You can tell when a piece of writing recommends a book the writer has not actually read. It sits at the surface. I try to steer away from writing about what I have not researched, but I think it’s evident in my writing when I do this.

After the Wuthering Heights discourse and the subsequent wave of classics reading lists, I was, to be frank, irritated. Not because I think people should not read classics, but because I dislike prescriptive lists on principle. I work in compliance, and the phrases you must read these books or ten books you should read before you die would never pass my review. These small directive words do something insidious: they impose a particular model of reading onto people who did not ask for it, and they sell a certain kind of literary identity rather than a genuine love of books.

Reading is reading. My husband reads Quora. Some people read the backs of cereal boxes. Any reading is better than none and all of it involves mental processing, attention, engagement with language. And whilst there are particular pleasures and benefits to literary fiction, we should stop loading readers with lists that tell them they are doing it wrong. Lists are also, frankly, the minimum viable effort. At least justify the list. At least tell me why.

Gabbert wrote before this particular wave of list making took hold, but her impatience with it feels completely contemporary. Time is limited. Read what makes you happy. Will I be reading Austen any time soon? No. I have tried Austen and I do not enjoy Austen, and I see no reason to put myself through it. That does not make me any less well read.

Party Lit

I am not someone who has ever really partied. I went to a club once, stood there looking visibly wrong because of my complete inability to dance, was singled out, followed around the floor, and eventually broke down in tears in front of a security guard. So I cannot claim much authority on the subject of real parties. I have, however, read a fair amount of party lit. And Gabbert quotes Gossip Girl, which I have watched.

“Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn.”

“Parties, like genes, exist to self-replicate. This partly explains why they all look the same.”

I could not help but think of the balls in Bridgerton. Those scenes are, in my opinion, some of the most boring in the series, and they do all look the same. A different colour scheme, a different theme, but the same format repeated. Lavish, with servants working their way through impossible quantities of food that nobody ever appears to eat, and an excess of flowers. Abundant and affluent and oddly airless.

The same is true of the parties in The Great Gatsby. There is a pattern that fictional parties follow, and I had never consciously identified it before Gabbert pointed it out.

Against Completionism

As noted, I am not a fan of Plath. I did not love The Bell Jar and I do not read much poetry, which means I cannot really participate in the more fervent Plath discourse. What I found interesting here was that Gabbert does love Plath and yet still identifies the novel’s particular strangeness with real precision. She has a phrase for it: the poet’s novel.

“The Bell Jar is a justifiable classic, shimmering with insight and good jokes. It does that thing that poets’ novels do: it moves unpredictably, with the kind of I’m-not-entirely-sure-what-I’m-doing quality that can make for excellent dancing.”

“Having read the whole novel, I can confirm Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work.”

I will confess that I am not a lyrical prose reader. I like novels that are blunt and punchy. The poet I have probably the most time for is Larkin, traditional and iambic. When I do read poetry I have very little patience for anything experimental. So the quality Gabbert is describing here, that sense of just vibing with the words as the paragraphs dissolve into one another, makes sense to me as a description even if it is not something I seek out. The poet is playing with form, but that play can work against the experience a novel reader like me is looking for.

I found myself wondering whether this was something other poet novelists do. Margaret Atwood came to mind immediately. She began with poetry and moved into fiction, but her novels have always felt formally grounded to me. I have also read her poetry, Dearly in particular, and liked it very much. Atwood seems to hold both forms steadily, which perhaps makes her the exception.

A Complicated Energy

Earlier this year I moved from hybrid working to fully remote, following an office relocation. It was supposed to be temporary and ended up lasting several months. I knew it would not suit me. I need to leave the house in order to stay sane, not necessarily to talk to anyone, but simply to separate from the space where I also sleep and eat and exist outside of work hours.

Gabbert writes about working from home during the pandemic with a line that described my experience almost exactly.

“When I started working from home, I didn’t miss seeing my coworkers exactly, at least not as specific people. But I found I missed seeing people in general.”

I do not particularly like anyone I work with. My only real friend at the office was made redundant some time ago. So I work alone, eat lunch alone, and often go the whole day without speaking to anyone. And yet the office has a different quality to it. There are other people around you, working, moving, existing. You can feel a kind of low hum. You can observe how people interact and behave, which for a writer is not nothing.

Gabbert also brings in Woolf here, which I found unexpectedly generous given my complicated feelings about her.

“For writers, isolation can represent a kind of glamour. We need time and space to write, of course, but not total, extended isolation. If Woolf wanted a room of her own, she also wanted to ‘step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six,’ to join the ‘army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude.’”

I have written at length, and not always kindly, about A Room of One’s Own. But I loved the juxtaposition Gabbert places here. Woolf’s novels are full of roaming, full of streets and movement. I wrote about that in relation to Mrs Dalloway. There is a balance between the interior writing life and the world outside it, and I think Gabbert is right that both are necessary.

I do have one complaint, though. The glamour of commuting is only ever discussed in the context of public transport. Reading on the train, listening to music, watching the city pass through a window, eavesdropping on strangers. I too love a good bus journey. But nobody ever writes about commuting by car. As someone who once spent over four hours a day driving to and from work, I can tell you there is nothing romantic about sitting in traffic watching the minutes disappear. You cannot do anything but wait and see the time go by.