I Subscribed to Verso’s Book Club for Over a Year, and For What?
A well-intended decision ends in a flood of kinda-unwanted books.
There are some hard truths I’ve had to get used to as I begin to navigate a fourth decade alive on this planet. Turning 30 last November didn’t mean partying with friends or going somewhere I’d never been; instead, it meant dealing with the fact that new muscles and joints in my eyes, wrists and legs hurt suddenly, that food that had been a staple of my 20s was not only no longer viable but actively trying to harm me gastrointestinally, and that my youthful proclivity for reading tens of thousands of words a day had been steadily weakening in the decade since I left college and worked in the world.
The number of books I have read since 2010 is paltry, and it’s a source of great shame. Despite theoretically liking to read, despite understanding that maintaining a reading habit is brutally important in the world we live in, despite pursuing writing as a side-gig/“my calling,” I let my reading ability atrophy so profoundly that I found it excruciating to read more than five pages at a time by summer 2020. It’s not that I felt my mind wander as I flipped through the book; it’s that the act of picking up a given book signaled to my brain that it was time to take a day-trip out of my skull.
You might find this surprising given not only what I do on the side, but also what my day job is: I’m a corporate instructor for a technical support company. My job is literally to convey information to people with the help of detailed lesson plans and knowledge base resources. I literally read every day!
There’s a difference, of course, between reading for pleasure and reading for work. Especially when that reading isn’t about absorbing the material so much as it is essentially “performing” the material to a class of new employees. Especially when you suspect that you lightly dissociate for several hours out of your working day and basically run on auto-pilot during that time.
It doesn’t help that the act of reading has essentially changed for me from being able to silently speed-read massive chunks of text at once with pretty good comprehension to needing to read with some kind of audio assistance either via a screen reader or an audiobook in order to help me maintain my attention on the book and retain basically anything from it. Push comes to shove, I read aloud to myself if none of the other aforementioned options are available.
One thing I want to make clear is that I don’t want to attribute this to any kind of neurodivergence on my part, at least nothing that has been diagnosed. My difficulty with reading as an adult after being pretty good at it as a kid, I believe, comes primarily from two factors: actively not reading for several years, and undergoing a gradual but persistent change in how my brain handles and prioritizes tasks due to the nature of my day job and my time spent on social media (a lot. too much, even). I also don’t want to delegitimize these behaviors as possible manifesting symptoms of things like ADHD, nor do I want to understate that one of the things that exacerbated my “reading atrophy” was in fact an ableist joke someone told me about what they thought of people who read out loud to themselves, which I will not repeat here (I talk about it in this tweet).
As you can see above, this is a problem I’ve been thinking about for a while, and working on for just as long. Considering I wanted (and still want) to be a cultural critic, I began looking for ways to obtain a lot of books on cultural criticism quickly and relatively cheaply. This is where the Verso Book Club comes in. Now (last disclaimer, I swear) I don’t mean through this post to suggest that Verso Books has done anything wrong (except not recognize its workers union contract what the fuck y’all) here. As far as they’re concerned they provided exactly the service they advertised. But boy did I make a mistake.
The first few months were more or less fine, as I had initially signed up as a “reader,” Verso’s bottom-tier book club membership option. The “reader” tier offered “every ebook we publish each month” in a DRM-free download from their website. Ebooks are small files that can be tucked away in a reader app like Kindle or Apple’s Books app. But their convenience led to a problem: I wasn’t actually opening any of these books that were starting to steadily flow in. I would just download the file, open it in the reader app of my choice, and then almost immediately close the app and do something my brain thought was more important, like *checks notes* play Destiny 2 or *shuffles papers, almost drops stack* criticize someone’s bad Godzilla take.
So I threw down several extra dollars-per-month for Verso’s “comrade” tier. In this tier, Verso promised to send me “every new ebook that we publish as well as our monthly Book Club and Comrade selections in the mail.” On top of the pile of ebooks I was accruing I’d also be able to have in hand a new small collection of actual physical books each month. What could go wrong?
At first, nothing.
And really, for a few months, nothing.
The physical books Verso was sending were interesting, on topics that I had familiarity with or thought were neat. Titles like Silicon Values by Jillian C. York or Being Numerous, a collection of post-2016 anarchist essays by Natasha Lennard, were very welcome. I even got very deep into Jacques Rancière for a minute as a result of the book club.
But the stack of books I got from Verso quickly became a pile. And for every rad title I was getting, like a semi-fictional biography of Edward Said by Dominique Eddé or set of newly republished essays by Walter Benjamin, I was also getting stuff like “Liberalism at Large: The World According to The Economist,” or “The Northern Question: British Politics and the North-South Divide.” I’m sorry to say these latter two titles were simply not interesting to me in any sense, and yet I couldn’t choose not to have them. As part of my “participation” in the book club, I had to take the good with the bad, or at least the personally interesting with the nonsensical.
As I neared and then passed my 30th birthday a few months ago, I realized something else: I wasn’t actually reading any of this physical material either. I had been reading some game studies books lately, and thanks to a new set of college classes I was taking found it easier to actually get through more than a couple pages at a time, but my initial strategy for beating my reading issues just… had not worked at all. And the worse part was: I now had too many books.
This is purely a bourgeois problem, obviously. It’s silly to complain about. But rather than look at this ridiculous pile of books on my floor with nowhere to go (until I build this bookshelf I had to order) and think, “damn, what a wonderful trove of human social and critical knowledge I’ve accumulated,” I think instead: “fuck, what am I gonna do with all this shit if I have to move?”
Again, this is not Verso’s fault. They told me they’d be sending me books until I said “when.” I just never said “when.”
Reading is a practice. Even if you were good at it when you were a kid, neglecting to keep the practice up means you’re going to lose some aptitude at it over time. And keeping up your aptitude at reading will invariably be met with resistance as you become more of a person in the world. Time for reading will go down as the other things in your life that expect to take up a chunk of your time — work, children, partners, social obligations, even other acts of “self-care” — increase. And even if you do manage to sneak back some of that time and repurpose it for reading, you might be daunted by its sudden and inexplicable difficulty.
I finally unsubscribed from the Verso Book Club this month after finally understanding that my rationalizations for sticking with it were paper thin, and that I wasn’t actually getting what I was looking for out of it. I wanted new and novel material to regenerate my innate interest in and aptitude for reading, and that wasn’t something the book club — or any publisher-run book club, in my opinion — is able to provide. The same day I went to a local corporate bookseller and bought a couple of books by David Graeber: Debt: The First 5000 Years, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, and The Dawn of Everything, cowritten by David Wengrow. I bought these books because I had the audiobook version of them. I’ve been listening to/reading through Bullshit Jobs, and as of right now I’m pleased to say I’m almost done with Chapter 4. This single act has been more effective than 17 months as a “Comrade.”
If you liked to read in the past but find it hard to find the time (or simply just difficult), I want to encourage you to come back to it in any way you can, using any method at your disposal. Whatever makes it easiest for you, you should do it. Chances are even good there are groups of folks out there who are also rediscovering reading in this way. Here’s what you shouldn’t do, though: subscribe to a book club where a publisher sends you dozens of physical books — many of which you will likely never read — in the hopes that it will kickstart your love of and aptitude for reading. It won’t, and that’s not what those book clubs are really for.
You’ll just end up with a big book pile and a lot of questions.
