The Untapped Power of the Bathtime Read

Sometime in my 20s, I stopped reading. Bathing with books helped me start again.

Here’s a fun fact: I read City of Glass by Paul Auster in the shower. To be more specific, I read it in one sitting, in the accessible shower in my dorm’s bathroom at the University at Buffalo in 2015. It was early March, and I was not, at the time, “doing great.” I was broke, had overloaded my course schedule to cope with having no social life, and my homophobic roommate hated me; I regularly slept on the couch in my dorm kitchen to avoid her. The night I ended up taking that shower–which lasted from around 11pm to 3am–I'd spent the day schlepping between classes in the grimy snow, gone to my 5pm art books studio course, and only realized after I'd managed to down a crummy slice of pizza from the dining hall that City of Glass was still on my nightstand, due tomorrow and still very much unread.

I desperately wanted to impress my professor with a few pithy comments about the reading the next morning (she was a 30-something butch from Canada who wore tailored suits to every lecture; I never stood a chance), so skipping it wasn't an option. But I was bone-tired and miserable. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed or under a blanket on the couch, where I knew that I'd inevitably fall asleep and sabotage myself. But I wanted comfort. I wanted something that wasn't a cold plastic seat in the library.

For some reason, cold and emotionally distressed as I was that night, I started daydreaming about taking a hot bath. The fantasy of the middle-aged housewife gripping a Sarah Dessen novel in a bubble bath “just to unwind” took root in my mind and wouldn’t leave. God, when was the last time I had taken a bath? It just seemed like it might fix me. Delirious with stress, I got it into my head that maybe, somewhere in the gigantic dorm complex, there was a secret bathtub–something I could sneak into by pretending I lived on that floor. So I grabbed my book and my bath caddy and proceeded to wander around the dorm in search of it.

Obviously, time wore on and no such bathtub materialized. By the time I gave up, it was almost 11PM. I've learned over the years that I am not really at my best at night, at least not for making new decisions. I sort of tend to lock around 10:30 and whatever I'm doing then, I'm doing for the rest of the night. Perhaps this explains why I decided that the next best thing to being comfortable in a bathtub was to be sort of damp and lightly steamed. My floor had no one who used the accessible shower, let alone anyone who would want it at this hour. It had a bench. I could sit. And so I did: I stomped into the bathroom, stripped, angled the shower head so it would hit my legs and torso but not my arms, and planted myself down for long winter’s read.

If you know me or my taste in books, the fact that I loved City of Glass should be no surprise. The would-be detective story, full of Auster's signature forward motion, eventually unravels into a fate of bleak, physical isolation for its protagonist, and something about the animal experience of squatting in a shower while I followed his journey made the novel really land.

I actually managed to enjoy myself, though I never did it again. The shower I took that night was just a weird, desperate attempt at creature comforts by a weird, desperate 19-year-old. But City of Glass is still special to me. In fact, when I look back at all the books I read during my college years (I took so many "just for fun" literature classes that I ended up racking up enough credits for an English minor), it’s the only fiction book I was assigned that feels like it could be sorted into the category of pleasure read.

A post dug up from my 2015 tumblr blog where I discuss my shower reading. This was definitely not a cry for help!

I was chatting with a friend yesterday who’s been having trouble with pleasure reading. Like many people I talk to about this topic, their issue wasn’t a lack of interest–just the opposite, they’d love to be reading– but a multi-pronged mental block: the combination of a short attention span, anxiety about what books to read and how to read them, and being short on time. That particular cocktail is familiar to me as a long haul fighter against executive dysfunction. Yes, yes, the trendiest term on the ‘pop psychology infographic’ side of the internet—but hear me out. I’m not here to tell you what is or isn’t a symptom of something; let’s take it as given that we all experience some degree of this feeling and move on. At its root, executive dysfunction is an issue with the brain’s emotional reward system, a system we all have and which is surprisingly easy to sabotage. It's often situational, too: you can get into a rut about a specific task, and it eventually takes on overlarge emotional weight, making it progressively harder to approach the longer you avoid it.

It’s easy for reading to become one of those impossible tasks. We put a lot of stock into what being a well-read person means; it can be aspirational but scary. Following my college years where I read constantly, I was burnt out and terribly insecure, afraid that I was just an imposter reader/writer/artist, that I would never be able to learn enough. And, because of this, there was a long stretch of time where reading felt almost impossible. I did try, but I picked away at books like one picks a scab, which compounded my guilt and made reading in earnest even harder. I even found myself doing something I’d never done before: lying about which books I’d read.

But then it changed. It’s different now; I’m reading again. I read all the time. I refuse to keep an exact count, because I tend to get competitive about these things, but I can say with confidence that this year I’ve already read more books than I did in 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined.

The dark period post-adolescence where you feel like you can’t read is apparently very common. It makes sense. We’ve just had to read, a lot, and we’re extra vulnerable. This period is so life-phase specific that I hesitate to blame it on distractions like social media, but some people also never grow out of it and never read for pleasure after doing so in high school in college.

Obviously that wasn't true for me. It’s a change that has crept up on me. I tried to figure out when it changed so I could give my friend some tips. To piece together a timeline, I ended up looking up photos of books on my phone, to see when I started really collecting them again, and I came across a photo of Auster’s The New York Trilogy, which I’d finally read in full (City of Glass is just one part) in the summer of 2020.

This time, though, the book wasn’t gripped with desperation in a grimy dorm shower. In the picture, I’d positioned my copy, as had become routine for me, on a little bamboo bath tray, complete with a miniature French press of coffee and a hot, inviting tub of water in which to pass the time.

I hadn’t thought about my shower-reading escapades in years until I revisited this photo, but seeing it was a lightbulb moment. It all came flooding back at once.

During the pandemic, I became a reader again, and I did it by taking baths.

Let me explain. One of the loveliest features of our shoebox-sized San Francisco apartment, where my fiancée and I lived from 2020 to 2021, was a clawfoot bathtub. It was one of the reasons we rented the place; you had to walk through an absolutely dismal kitchen to get to it, but once you did, you were transported. The bathroom was nothing special, but the tub was practically an oasis. We needed one at the time; San Francisco had shut down so wholly and completely that there wasn’t much else to do.

In fact, our total lack of stimulation and social activity had started to make me neurotic. I’ll admit to some social media posturing at this point: my cute little bath tray and French press were chosen because they were photogenic. They made me look like I had my shit together even though we had no friends and went nowhere. Our bathtub, which looked like it belonged in a much nicer apartment, wasn’t just a flex. At the time, it was kind of my only flex. And what went better with a bath tray setup than a book? A phone or iPad simply wouldn’t do; like the housewife fantasy I’d entertained in 2015, it had to be a book. And, despite the decline of my reading habits, I still owned plenty of books, so I started to bring them with me—usually without my phone directly to hand after I’d snapped my little picture—for hour long soaks in the tub.

Eventually, I went off the deep end and started coordinating my bath bombs & accessories to the themes and design of the books I was reading.

People who are into fitness say that the first thing to do, if you want to be like them, is simply show up at the gym. Fitness, if you want results, has to be habitual; if you want to form a habit, start by focusing on the habitual part over the thing itself. At the gym, you don’t even have to work out at first if you want to form a habit. Walk around. Sit in the sauna. Eventually you’ll get on the treadmill. Books in baths are the same: even if you only hold the book, or peek at a few pages, you’re interacting with it in a calm space dedicated to time alone with it. And next time, maybe you’ll read a whole chapter.

Looking back, I realize that’s exactly what happened to me, as being a reader crept up on me again through a month of Sunday afternoons spent bathing. The ultimate genius of the bathtub read as a strategy for getting back into reading is that it places the book as secondary to the bath, but the bath ensures you’re a captive audience. Eventually you might let yourself be caught. The early phase of this process where you’re still a little shy around your book of choice is why I recommend people start with poetry or collections of essays as their first tub companions. They’re nice and digestible; you can feel accomplished about having read one good poem or one good essay, and your brain’s reward system will love that. Look at you! You’re a reader! It worked for me: two of the first bathtime books I finished in full were Leonard Cohen’s The Book of Longing and Proxies by Brian Blanchfield.

I've found that emotional baggage you’ve collected over the years about being or not being a reader melts away when your primary job is to lounge in some hot water. By bringing my books with me and setting aside time to bathe, I’d managed to completely skip over the perfectionistic thought cycle that triggered my executive dysfunction around reading. I wasn't a reader. I was a bather. I just started reading because the books were in front of me.

Two more bathtime reads. I don’t recommend Proust in the tub, actually–if you’re reading Proust right, it’s a bit of a sensory overload.

Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment when my habit of bathtime book-toting finally kicked down the mental block I had about reading once and for all. I was in the bath, reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed for the first time. But in this memory, I was reading not from a photogenic print edition, but on my phone, via an eBook I’d checked out from the library. I scrolled through my phone's photo library and found evidence that, around this time, I had recently finished Orlando. I vaguely recall that the themes of gender fluidity in that book had led me to reflect on how much I'd loved Left Hand of Darkness, and that I'd suddenly wanted Ursula in my life again, and that I’d taken the fastest, cheapest path to a copy of The Dispossessed, something I’d always wanted to read. In 2017, I would have seen this and said "Wait, since when do I actually make good on my ‘to be read’ pile?" It had been growing bigger, steadily, stressfully, for years. And this was the first time I’d taken an intentional swing at it since college instead of picking at whatever book I had on hand. I really wanted to read, and I read. My new habit had stuck. I no longer associated baths with my little tray setups, where the physical book was present, but with the actual act of reading.

I also remember this moment above all the others because of how reading The Dispossessed made me feel. Memories from the month I spent with it are sharply defined by the fact that I was reading it. I was truly moved; I was inspired; I felt that wonderful headrush you get when reading a good book where it feels like the entire universe is congealing around the book’s heavy nuclear mass, where for a moment, everything has to be considered in relationship to its content. Where the book feels like it is the universe. That’s what happens to me, at least, and it's what makes me read and keep reading voraciously, chasing trains of thought between novels and criticism and books of poetry just because the written word is so, so good at making you feel like you're alive and part of the world. There’s really nothing like it. I’m glad to be back at it.

Anyways, that’s my story: take or leave it. Maybe knowing that tub-reading is a strategy ruins the possibility of using it as one, but I’m hopeful for you. If you have a tub, take a book on a date to one; if you don’t, or don’t like baths, maybe there’s another idle activity you can this idea it into. Maybe a picnic? Picnics are photogenic. Let's go with that: if you have a blanket and can make a sandwich, go on a picnic with a book and an almost-dead phone and see if some sparks fly, if you eventually inch closer to it like a nervous prom kid trying to hold hands. Or, you know, you could sit in the shower. But I don’t recommend it.