The Reading Life of... Naomi Kanakia

A conversation about the Great Books, self-education, and reading with integrity

I have wanted to talk to Naomi Kanakia for a long time. We first met, as so many wonderful literary friendships now begin, through Substack — bonding over our shared love of classic literature¹ and the pleasures terror of building a reading life in public. Over time, I have come to admire not just Naomi’s taste, but the quality of her attention. She reads with rigor and reverence, but also with a kind of self-awareness and self-possession that I find deeply inspiring.

What I love about Naomi as both a reader and a writer is that she has created a perspective that feels entirely her own. Again and again, she gives herself a job and goes after it — whether that means immersing herself in the classics, Middle English literature, Thomas Bernhard, or the history of magazine culture. There is something deeply motivating about watching someone pursue intellectual life with that much vigor, sincerity and curiosity.

The timing for this conversation is no coincidence. Naomi has a new book coming out next week: What’s So Great About the Great Books? — a thoughtful and generous defense of reading classic literature.²

In the book Naomi writes that she is drawn to great books because they possess integrity — they take their own ideas seriously and pursue them with nuance and complexity.

The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonumous with taste.

The passage perfectly describes Naomi’s own work as well.

What follows is a generous tour of Naomi’s reading brain: why she reads, how she reads, how writing shapes her reading life, and how she sustains attention in an age designed to fracture it. I have been anxiously anticipating this conversation and I’m so excited to finally be able to share it with you.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

As a kid, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy, and I grew up wanting to be a sci-fi writer. Within the SF community, the advice to aspiring writers is that you should read everything—so, after college, I decided that if I was going to be a serious writer I needed to read all the classics. You know, stuff like Proust and Tolstoy and Herodotus—all the books I’d heard about, but never read.

I got very into reading these books, and to this day I have a similar pattern, where I’ll pick up some book I’ve vaguely heard about, and then I’ll get extremely engrossed by that time/author/period/style and read a dozen related books. And then I’ll move on.

About four years ago, I started writing about books, first for literary periodicals like The Los Angeles Review of Books, and then for my own blog, Woman of Letters. As a result, my reading had to change—now I read not just to educate myself, but with an eye to whether I can write about this book.

As an outgrowth of all this writing about books, I ended up with a contract from Princeton University Press to write a defense of reading the Great Books (i.e. all those old great books we’ve all heard about). And that book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?, will be coming out next week, on May 26th.

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On an average week, how much do you read and when?

For years and years, I would track my reading time, and I always struggled to read more than fifteen hours a week. Eventually, all this tracking started to feel very odious and compulsory, so I stopped. Now my perception is that I mostly read in the evenings and at night, after my daughter has gone to bed. But I also read sometimes in the afternoon after I’ve finished writing. I highly doubt that I’m reading more than fifteen hours a week.

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What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

I like all kinds of things! The main change is that about five years ago, during the pandemic, I realized that I’d read most of the classic books that I was truly excited about reading, so I’d need to stretch and go further afield, reading things that sounded less appealing. This was a great decision—it led me to pick up Chaucer, and I got very into Middle English literature. I also went through a phase where I read a lot of Kant and Hegel—very difficult, but quite rewarding.

PKG: My husband’s dissertation is on Kant’s aesthetics … and I have been scared to read it since he defended it 20 years ago. Reading Naomi’s book and now the interview is giving me the perhaps delusional confidence that maybe I am ready for it.

I also started to read this strain of very Romantic maximalist literature (think Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright) that’s out of fashion, but which I ended up enjoying a lot.

So nowadays I really look for whatever I’m resistant to. For instance, for years I was very allergic to the classic 20th-century domestic realist story (I was like, this is just stories about sad middle-class people), but when I finally picked up John Cheever I loved him, and that sent me on a tear, where I read lots of these New Yorker stories.

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What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

Like all people nowadays, I struggle with fragmented attention. Whenever I feel like I’m getting too distracted, I’ll use a little stopwatch and set a timer for twenty minutes during which I’m not allowed to look at my phone. During that time, if any thoughts occur to me, I’ll just jot them down using a pen and paper (or, lately, the stylus for my Kindle Scribe). Once I’ve done this a few times in a week, my mind will settle down, and I’m able to concentrate better.

But I’ve gone through ENDLESS rituals to maintain the integrity of my attention. It’s such an ongoing struggle. I had years when I would lock my phone in a timed safe, but after I had a child, it started feeling irresponsible to be out of touch for hours at a time.

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Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils?

Yes, nowadays I read mostly on my Kindle Scribe, which is a large Kindle that has a stylus that allows you to take notes on the page. I use this to jot down stray thoughts—I almost never look at these notes, but it keeps my hands occupied and keeps me from looking at my phone.

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How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I have notions. Sadly, my reach exceeds my grasp—when I get into a topic I end up buying around three times as many books as I end up reading. But these recent purchases end up in a pile somewhere (or on the most recent page of my Kindle library), and the pile structures what I read next. I also keep a lot of random books around the house and sometimes I’ll browse through them, and they’ll send me in a totally new direction. For instance about fifteen years ago I bought a Kindle version of Njal’s Saga, the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas.

Three years ago I randomly opened the file and got absorbed, which set me onto a three-month journey where I read a lot of Old Norse literature.

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Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Writing a newsletter has really changed my reading life, because now I’m in conversation with my audience and with other newsletter writers. A lot of the time, I read things because they’re bubbling up on the internet. For instance, I just read Yesteryear because there’s been so much Substack discourse about it. I’d also been hearing about Walter Ong a lot, so I read his big book, Orality and Literacy.

Then I’ll have some longer-term projects—I’ve gotten into reading Thomas Bernhard for what I hope will be a big piece, and I’ve been reading a lot of literary journals too—I have a huge stack of issues of The Yale Review, The Believer, The Baffler, etc in my living room.

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How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

For big writing projects, I have developed a sense for what kinds of books I’ll need to read in order to start making an argument—I’ll move both forward and backwards from an author. I’ll read both their influences and the people they influenced. Then I’ll read some of the secondary literature about them. There’s definitely a process to this kind of reading. In the beginning I have to read a lot, in an exploratory way, but towards the end, my reading needs to get narrower and more focused on what I need to make my argument. The trick is to read enough that you feel confident in what you’re trying to say, but not so much that you get bogged down by the complexity and feel unable to say anything at all.

PKG: Finding the balance between “enough to feel confident” and “not so much that you get bogged down” is so hard! I was incredibly impressed by how readable Naomi’s book is, given its lofty subject, and my overwhelming feeling of it was one of embodied knowledge. #goals

The same is true for smaller projects. I’m always looking out for topics where it’s possible to just read one book and then write a post about it. Then there’s a rhythm to these bite-sized projects too.

What’s really hard is for me to read a one-off book that’s disconnected from my overall writing life. In February, I reread Les Miserables. It’s extremely long—took a month to read—and blew a hole in my writing schedule because it only resulted in one (not particularly popular) post. I can do that once in a while, but not often.

Oftentimes my blog gets sorted into seasons. Last year, for the first half of the year, I was writing mostly about 19th-century American literature, and for the second half I wrote mostly about 20th-century magazine culture. This happens pretty naturally, as a result of my changing interest, but it’s always scary when I’m between seasons, looking for something new that’ll hold my interest long-term.

It’s really exciting when that happens though, because it gives me the chance to sell my readers on something new.

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When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

I love playing video games. But about fifteen years ago, I essentially stopped. For a while I convinced myself that I was too mature for games, but then maybe ten years ago I bought an XBox and spent a hundred and fifty hours playing Fallout: New Vegas, one of the best games of all time. It was such an immersive, awe-inspiring experience. I played Disco Elysium five years ago—same thing, one of the best games I’ve ever played. Such an intricate, well-told story. Since then I don’t think I’ve really completed another game—just don’t have the time to drop a hundred hours into a game anymore.

It’s very sad. Do you know how many incredible games have come out in the last fifteen years?

PKG: LOL.

I am 100 percent positive, I would love Baldur’s Gate 3, but I’ve never played it. If I told this to myself at age fifteen, she would be appalled! Do you mean Baldur’s Gate 3 finally came out and you’ve NEVER played it? But there’s just no time.

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Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

Go easy on yourself. This is true not just in my reading life, but for the pursuit of any goal—perfectionism is the true enemy. People spend months beating themselves up because they’re not reading every second, all the time, but really the best thing is to start small, just set a timer and read for ten minutes. I think you’ll find that if you set out to read for ten minutes, you’ll often end up reading for an hour or two. But if you tell yourself you must read for two hours, then frequently you won’t start at all, and the day’ll be lost.

My years of tracking my reading made me very realistic about how much I read—I almost never did more than fifteen hours a week, but that was enough to read Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, Tale of Genji, Story of the Stone, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and hundreds of other difficult and intimidating books.

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What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Recently I’ve become convinced that Robert Caro’s The Lives of Lyndon Johnson (his four-volume biography of the former president) is the closest thing contemporary America has produced to a Great Book. This series is a titanic achievement, a study of power and governance in 20th-century America. The depth of research is incredible, and it’s full of hundred-page mini-essays and asides, like Caro’s long study of rural electrification, or of the way that power works in the Senate. I read the first three books in high school, and I’ve since read them several more times, and each time I’ve come away inspired.

What I found so inspiring about this conversation is that Naomi speaks about reading from the other side of sustained effort. You can feel, in her answers, the accumulated weight of years spent following curiosities all the way down — through difficult books, changing interests, moments of resistance and breakthrough. How cool that she is sharing her experience so openly with us and showing us that we, too, can do this if we try.

🤓 So let’s chat about this:

• Which of Naomi’s tips or reading habits felt most relatable to you — and is there one you’re curious to try in your own reading life?

• What has your relationship to the “Great Books”?

• What’s a “war story” from your own reading life — a difficult book, obsessive phase, abandoned project, or unexpected literary rabbit hole that changed you as a reader?

1. The “love” in my case has been more akin to “overcoming shame” or “fear.”

2. My notes on the book will be included in my monthly reading wrap-up next week.