Sam Brooks is a playwright, journalist and critic, and has written for Ensemble about Vogue New Zealand, men and shorts, spending Christmas solo and Instagram Reels being better than TikTok.
I’ve always been a reader. I was that kid who would spend his afternoons with his head deep in a book, which is not too strange. I was also that kid who would walk from point A to point B reading a book, looking up only occasionally to make sure that I wasn’t strolling into traffic. So I’m not just a reader, but someone who will read at the risk of bodily harm.
This love of reading has blessedly carried through into my adult life. As a writer, I think it is a necessity to read voraciously; a writer who doesn’t read is like an athlete who doesn’t train or a chef who doesn’t eat. You can definitely still call yourself one but you probably won’t get very far. At time of writing, I have 22 books checked out from the library with 57 holds. This is neither a brag nor an admission, but hey, there are some books you have to get on the queue for early. (I currently expect to read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo sometime between 2026 and the heat death of the universe.)
I used to be a massive Kindle user. As someone who reads quite quickly, and I would even say voraciously, the ability to finish one book and have not just one book but several, ready to go at the few swipes of a finger, was hugely useful. I owned, and still own, dozens of books on a device between the size of my phone and my laptop. Convenient, sure, but is it the ideal reading experience?
In the past few years, I’ve grown to fall back in love with the paper book. The feeling of holding something in my hands, carrying it from place to place, seeing the bookmark (or dog-eared page, sorry!) move further and further along. It feels tactile, like a return to the old days of childhood when I actually would just be reading one book at a time, rather than the feral days of the present where I have 22 books spread out across my flat like a particularly benign and unfocussed serial killer.
With few exceptions, a book is one of the few pieces of art that you can really physically touch and feel.
When you pick it up, there’s a connection between you and the writer. All of the love, all of the words, all of the weight they’ve put into that book is being held in your hands. That experience, as woo-woo as it might sound, can’t be replicated with a screen.
One of the most relaxing things I do in a day is towards the close: I pick up whatever book I happen to be reading, or perhaps even start one, read through as many pages as it takes before I feel the evening slip away, fold the page down, and put the book down. In that action, I gently put a close on my day. Regardless of what is in the book – be it a fantasy door stopper with too many murders, or an insufferable novella about friends in their mid-twenties with not nearly enough murders – it’s a remarkably zen process.
When you finish a paper book, you feel like you’ve finished it. You put it down. You look at it. You consider however many hours you’ve spent with it. I finished The Luminaries on a Kindle and it just didn’t feel as good as I know it would’ve felt if I had physically shifted the 10kg (I assume that’s how much the book weighs) novel out of my hands and onto the shelf.
There is also the capitalistic urge to simply own something, to feel like this copy of a book is mine. Mine to read, mine to look at mine, but also? Mine to give away. A book is my favourite gift to give somebody; it shows that you’ve thought of them and what they want in their life. It might encourage them back to read – or it might feel like homework – but ideally, it enriches someone’s life.
This allows me to engage in the deeply specific joy of seeing a book on my stupidly stacked coffee table, inviting a friend over, seeing the book and the friend together, and then being like, “Oh, you absolutely have to read this!” I do not expect to see the book, but know it is going to another home, to be enjoyed. Or to rest on their bookshelf, reminding my friend they have not read it, forevermore.
I think it’s good advice in general to put down a screen and pick up a book, but in this case, I’d highly recommend letting the Kindle die down, heading down to your local bookstore or library and picking up a book. It just hits different, you know?
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As a little extra: my personal books to have right in front of me, at any given moment.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Not only is this my favourite book, I have several copies of it with different covers. Does anybody not want to see the visages of Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore staring out at them every morning? I certainly do.
The Fleabag Scriptures by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Whenever I need a bit of a brain shake-up when I’m writing, I’ll open this one to a random page, inhale it, and then go back to writing.
#VeryFat #Very Brave: The Fat Girl's Guide to Being #Brave and Not a Dejected, Melancholy, Down-In-The-Dumps Weeping Fat Girl in a Bikini by Nicole Byer
Because everybody should encounter a photo of Nicole Byer in their daily life.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I actually don’t currently have a copy of this book because I’ve given it away. That’s because, whenever I swing by a second hand bookstore, I pick up a copy of this book to give it to someone. It’s not my favourite book, but it is the book I give to anyone to re-ignite their love of reading.
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
One, this is a great book – an epic example of the worldbuilding that nobody in New Zealand does better than Elizabeth Knox. Two, it looks super impressive to have on your coffee table. (Also, in a pinch when I’m scrambling at 11:01am to make an 11am meeting, it makes for a tremendous Zoom stand.)
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
This is just one of those books that I personally love to pick up, just to feel better. It has a lovely floral cover, and is essentially a book of quick essays by the poet about things that delight him, including “Beast Mode”, “Public Lying Down”, “Babies. Seriously.” and my favourite, “My Birthday, Kinda.”
