Shelf Reflection is a monthly series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of our featured First Book Club authors.
This month’s reflection is from visual and performance artist SJ Norman, whose debut short fiction collection Permafrost (UQP) won the inaugural KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award. Read Ellen Cregan’s review, and stay tuned for a podcast interview with SJ later in the month!
What are you currently reading?
I’m slowly making my way through Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir Dear Senthuran, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, Jeffrey Kripal’s Secret Body, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, Lou Sullivan’s collected diaries, and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body.
What kind of reader are you?
I read widely in terms of form and genre, and I usually have multiple books on the go. I will often spend a long time reading a single work, often in focused bursts, sometimes over the course of months or even years. I am by no means a voracious reader. I am a careful, deliberating and discriminating reader. It baffles me as to why anyone would want to rush the experience of reading a book. Most books take years to write, so my tendency is to pay the work and the author the respect of my full and enduring attention, even if that attention is sporadic and cyclical. Similarly, if something is simply not for me, I’ll usually know that by page 50. In that case I will pay that work and myself the respect of putting it down, and passing it on. I don’t understand the bloody-minded urge some readers seem to have to complete books they don’t enjoy—seems like a punishing thing to put yourself and the book through. There are very rare cases when a book consumes me ecstatically and leaves me wrecked—these are few and far between though. I treasure those experiences.
The only book I have re-read more than twice is Wuthering Heights. I’ve re-read Sarah Schulman’s After Delores, and I will probably re-read The Argonauts and Freshwater at some point, but I don’t make a habit of it.
Most books take years to write, so my tendency is to pay the work and the author the respect of my full and enduring attention.
I read first thing in the morning, and late at night. I also love to read on the beach—something about the sound of the surf gives me a deeper capacity to focus. Reading on long bus journeys also does it for me—I have raging ADHD and can find it very hard to sit still, so being in motion or being somewhere where there is some kind of repetitive sonic input (like the sound of waves, or an engine) can help be fall deeper into a text. I often stand and pace while reading, for the same reason.
I also love, love love reading aloud to people and being read to. It’s one of the most exquisite intimacies I know. The other night, a loved one came over when I was really in a pit of grief, picked up a book and started reading to me. I was able to sleep that night, and able to get up feeling loved and purposeful. The same person had been in my home a few days beforehand pulled a collection of Sylvia Plath poems (the same copy I’ve had since I was 14) and started reading to me spontaneously. When they did, a pressed flower fell out of the pages, which I realised had been put there more than 20 years ago by the last person to read aloud to me from that book (another close friend). Reading to lovers is hot—I read the whole of Jonathan Kemp’s twenty-six aloud to a lover over the course of two rainy summer days, and most of Johnny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead to the same person when they were in the ICU after a near fatal accident. Those are the moments when I’ve really, truly recognised the power of writing as a craft—I often need to share the experience with another body.
I fucking love audiobooks. People can be snobby and weirdly egoic about their reading habits, as though reading from the page is the only way to read like a grown-up and preferring the audio version makes you somehow a lesser reader. What a nauseatingly pompous (and ableist) assumption. It’s also often such a joy to hear an author read their own work—Zadie Smith’s reading voice is a special treat, so is Akwaeke Emezi’s, and I think all of Tommy Pico’s work is best enjoyed this way, and the audio version of Andrea Long Chu’s Females was also great.
I love, love love reading aloud to people and being read to. It’s one of the most exquisite intimacies I know.
