BECAUSE WE ASSOCIATE WHAT WE READ WITH WHERE WE READ IT

---

A tangible book is more poetic than a digital one because the inescapable clamor of technology lurks behind every e-book’s text. The experience of reading Virginia Woolf’s words on a page will always eclipse reading them on a screen due to the static simplicity of ink on paper. Digital content’s kineticism is a distraction, a white noise that drowns out poetry’s subtler frequencies. With devices, there is always recourse to another entertainment option, but with real books, there is simply the text and the view in front of you. Reading a real, real good book is a poetic experience in and of itself that can be accentuated by the purlieu, so here are the 10 best reading nooks to nestle in and enjoy your printed book.

10. Riding in a Train, Bus, or Automobile

Through the passenger window, the landscape blurs by like woven straw, an amber and umber ambience for the reader in the seat, carried over many literal miles by the car, the bus, or the train they’re on that’s chugging through new and old terrains, as they’re transported over many metaphorical miles by the book they’re falling deeper into, movement within movement, the text closed upon arrival and settled palpitating into the reader-rider’s tote, to beat, ba-dump, ba-dump, a soundtrack for the experience of the destination. To the literary reader, feeling a printed book’s weight while traveling somewhere is an adamantine delight amid the velocity, the carriage into the unknown. To bring a text along for the ride is to bring a companion, and to hell with the rest of your troupe searching for the snack bar: you’ve got pages to burrow into.

9. With Coffee, at a Wobbly Garden Table the Morning after a Shindig

Coffee, that  liquid mental catalyst that alters our brain’s chemistry, and whose aroma instantly induces nostalgia for past moments involving coffee, naturally pairs with reading. (Alcohol seems like an even better idea at first, but generally leads to immersion in gibberish, and oh my goodness why is the room spinning?) But coffee, endlessly customizable, vessel for swirling cosmos, cream amplifier, is ideal to sip from a glazed ceramic cup settled on the cork coaster on the wobbly table in the yard the morning after a night of occasionally literary revelry while I subside into my seat beside the bougainvillea and see what Richard Brautigan saw on the Tokyo-Montana Express.

8. Beside Your Lover in Bed

This is a particularly rewarding reading experience because we’re all so enamored with chit-chat to fill the daunting space of the universe between us, and chit-chatting during reading results in not really reading at all (and a harrumph from your partner if you’re the one doing all the yammering). But once you’ve both settled into your favorite reading poses on the bed, (perhaps at a distance so that you can’t hear each other breathe but you can see each other’s aura out of the corner of your eye), as you both tumble into the texts taking you through meadows and tide pools, respectively, the sense of your favorite person’s mind working synchronously with yours, though in different realms, is more pleasurable than any removal of the universe between two people through bodies pressed together.

7. In Various Reading Nooks on a College Campus

I recently detailed the unique literary plight of college students: they read a ton, and then they don’t read at all. But in their heyday, college readers know that wading through all their required texts requires finding different reading nooks across campus, to allow the brain to study serenely in new scenery. My personal favorites, and the books I associate them most with, were: on the planter outside the campus jazz radio station that emanated its broadcast softly into the quad (Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein); cross-legged on the cold stone bench beside the university art store where students bustled past clutching breathtaking pastels and fat erasers (Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson); on the fourth floor of the humanities building haunted only by professors who left the scent of chalk and ink in their wake (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde); and among the statues in the sculpture garden where I would sit as still as the bronze and stone (Cane by Jean Toomer).

6. In a Moment Suspended

Every true literary reader always carries a book with them to fend off the boredom of unforeseen delays, and for the bit of comfort the text’s mere proximity provides. Since we permanently have a book within reach, every waiting moment can be transformed into a reading nook — from a long standby at the airport, to a boring party braying heavy metal, to lethargic lulls at work. In some cases, the situation’s ambience overwhelms and taints the reading experience, but other times, the sense of being sucked into a book amidst cacophony and the dismal light of consumerism can result in unexpectedly succoring print book reading nooks — a transformation of the nexus of time and space made possible by printed words on a page.

5. In a Cliché Cafe

There’s something about reading in a cafe that makes me feel so much like I’m reading in a cafe. Cafes escalate the aforementioned properties of coffee through perpetual percolation, ground coffee beans aromatics, and the espresso machine’s slurp. For as long as readers can remember, readers have been going to cafes to read and be seen reading by the other readers, along with writers, thinkers, artists, and conversationalists. In cafes, literature has a license to linger. Although libraries are the last great stashes of print books, cafes will always exist as noisy but familiar safe places to bring a text, settle down by the window with a frothy flat-white, and read amid humanity’s murmur. 

4. At the Little Wooden Desk on the 2nd Floor of the Library, by the Literature Section

Libraries are the last havens for physical books, and this sanctity of the printed word suffuses every cranny within these institutions. While one of the basic joys of libraries is the ability to take books home for free (it really can’t get better than that), another delight is finding reading nooks within the library where you can sit down and pore over more texts than you can carry away. Patrons have their preferences: some like to splay on the fuzzy armchairs (a no-no for neurotic readers); others like to sit at tables and read with strangers; still others like to find the most private, quiet, light-suffused study carrel and hole up with ten books. Most literary readers fall into this latter group, with our preferred book nook near the literature section, so that we can sit closest to the confessions of the best words in the library.

3. At Home During a Late Afternoon Autumn Rainstorm

As with other items on this list of the best reading nooks, ambience is a crucial factor in an enjoyable literary experience. The act of reading involves a partial immersion into the text, embedded in the hush and glow of the world continuing around us, and rain – rain is possibly the best canvas upon which a reading experience can be watercolored. Rain ushers us inside, where we must learn to be patient or get wet. Rain forces us to hear it, a liquid tick tack, tick tack, time passing in the splash of translucence and spheres, time stopped in the nexus of reflections and greys seen through the window — a view through a familiar window into rain falling on coral-red leaves is enough to satiate hungry nostalgia for years — a view through a window into rain is a memory that stays. And all this as ambience to the pages of the book we have settled down with on the little sofa with vantage into the yard and the sky – perhaps Eileen Myles’s Skies – with the trees lifting their skirts and high-stepping in place to the beat of the rain, the wind, the ruddy red green russet cleaned by water, annotated in silver.

2. In a Public Reading Nook Beside Someone Using an E-Reader, Laptop, or Scrolling on Their Phone

Whether on an orange seat beside someone on the subway, or in a wrought-iron chair across from them on the cobblestones outside a posh cafe, this reading nook is most satisfying if you employ lots of loud page turning, caresses of ink on paper, insertions of a gorgeous amethyst bookmark after a particularly moving passage for long pauses and stares off into space, rummaging through your tote for several more bookmarks because the aesthetic of each uniquely amplifies the book, not-so-subtle sniffs of the flyleaf, rapid flips back through pages to create a paper breeze wafted in the e-reader’s direction, clutches of the book to your thumping chest, long glances at the cover artwork and the back cover blurbs, close-examination of the typography on the spine, measuring of the book’s girth followed by vigorous nods of approval, and most importantly, long bouts reading your tangible, physical, real, printed book that provides a kinetic, olfactory, tactile, visual, and if you’re really into it, tasty, experience that no e-reader or digital device can ever provide.

1. Under a Tree as a Metaphor for Reading Print Books

I prefer oak trees, but each species has singular characteristics that calibrate the ambience of its understory, and each individual tree offers its own aura to illuminate your textual experience. When nestled in a reading nook under a tree, you’ll sense the roots winding deeply through the turf beneath your bottom, just like the sentences you read wing beyond the white space below them. There will be the leaves plummeting and still clinging to the branches with such tenacity, fluttering like the leaves of your book. There will be the sudden melancholy realization that your book was once part of a tree too – do the living tree and the transfigured tree speak to each other in some mingling of particles? There will be the canopy’s shadows on the ground punctuated by sunlight dapples, and rewritten by wind and time, akin to the words inked on your book’s pages after so many drafts. There will be the rough bark against your back and the moss that grows on this rind and the river of ants that you just noticed is now flowing over your foot, and so you will move around the circumference of the tree trunk, something like a sun-dial’s shadow radiating time and light, a reading experience redefined by a single plant.

---

California literati: stay tuned for a blog post covering the best locales around the Golden State to sit and read a book.