Reading isn’t always easy. That’s why I had to step up this summer

Put down your phone. Now back away.

It took me two attempts to get through Markus Zusak's novel Bridge of Clay.

Perhaps that's apt, as it reportedly took Zusak two decades to complete his most recently published work.

That’s not to say the writing isn’t brilliant, because it is. However reading a few pages of Bridge of Clay at bedtime each day was not enough for me to become invested in the people and story. The beginning is complex, with peculiar structure and language. There's minimal explanation; characters exist in the early pages without much context.

I put the book aside. I didn't care enough. In essence, I was too lazy.

But my mother insisted I give it another crack.

Plus, I heard an interview with Zusak on Radio National's The Book Show in which he describes his deliberate efforts to make the reader put in an effort.

"I think of all the books that I've loved.[..].and ... I feel like I did work for those books. And you are, you're exhausted and exhilarated at the end of it, and then you just go 'God, I'm alive' because of that", he said.

"I love the idea of sometimes you've got to step up as a reader to get your true reward."

So that's what I did. I stepped up over summer. I read Bridge of Clay. Not just at bedtime, but for long stretches during the daylight hours. I found it an incredibly emotional, wonderful novel.

Of course this reading success involved putting away my phone; that delivery device of junky content, that attention-span ruining machine providing snippets and titbits of material that fill my brain with unimportant noise and movement.

I made a commitment to immersive reading, says Judith Seaboyer from The University of Queensland.

I’m so glad I did.

Photo by Craig Cameron on Unsplash