Where do you read books? I read at the mall | Books - The Washington Post

Books are about people. Reading while you’re around them is a useful reminder of that, says Mark Athitakis, critic in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

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The perfect reading environment is hard to come by, which may be why it so often comes with a high price tag. For around $1,500, you can own a leather library chair from Restoration Hardware (“reminiscent of chairs found in the great reading rooms of Europe”). The Levenger Catalog, which specializes in reader-friendly gewgaws, promotes a genteel fantasy of reading constructed around an “ergonomic and ambidextrous” reading table, personalized bookmarks, bespoke pens for note-taking and bespoke notebooks in which to scribble.

Don’t do it. Don’t do any of it. If you want to read properly, go to a shopping mall — but don’t spend a nickel...

So, the mall it is.

Here, there’s a steady hum of humanity that feels like clapping on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Anodyne adult-contemporary pop wafts somewhere in the distance (Adele, Hall & Oates). Families stop at a neighboring couch to gather themselves and to consume pretzel-based snacks, then move on. I’ve never concentrated better, though I recognize this makes me seem a bit ridiculous; my affection for mall reading brings me dangerously close to becoming an Arizona stereotype with a track suit and an AARP discount card, ready to power-walk past the Nordstrom and Macy’s before dumping myself at the Sbarro, gorging myself through a late-capitalist hellscape with a soft-rock soundtrack and calling it living. However, being in the midst of all that at once allows me to recognize it as much as tune it out. Books are about people; reading while you’re around them is a useful reminder of that.

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Source: The Washington Post