LIVING IN NEW York, one grows accustomed to building safeguards. Commuting via the subway, for instance, requires specific defensive measures. The MTA suffers from chronic delays, regular breakdowns, the occasional track fire, and serious overcrowding. One conventional escape for most passengers is the application of headphones. Listening to music or a podcast (the city is home to many a "super listener") for the duration of a trip helps to obstruct the surrounding clamor.
My sanity-saving distraction, though, is reading. In the course of my daily jaunts—hurrying to work or schlepping back home after a night out—I've found apps like Pocket and Flipboard, which allow users to save articles or web pages for offline review, to be the most worthwhile tools against the anarchy of an MTA experience. The routine is unremarkable but efficient: I burrow myself into a corner seat and dive into an essay or longform article, with the hope of completing it before I arrive at my destination. Slowly, over time, what began as a survival tactic evolved into the most effective mode to metabolize information in short windows of time. It's not about speed reading—something I've never been terribly good at—but rather an exercise in self-optimized consumption.
I was never entirely opposed to mobile readers or offline reading apps, but for a long time I considered myself a purist when it came to absorbing literature. It was the one arena of my life where I remained a Luddite and balked at any hint of change. Not long ago, you'd be more likely to see me on my commute wielding a dog-eared, neon-highlighted paperback than with my neck craned toward an e-book or my iPhone, reading about the "Netflix of Africa" or the lie of racial transcendence. But, like an increasing number of Americans, I've come around to the pleasures of e-reading.
What I've learned to appreciate about Pocket—what, for me, is the real pull of an offline reading app—is how it makes the solitary gaze paramount. It's a welcome reversal from my days in grad school when, on average, I was juggling five books a week. Today, we are expected to move and work and live multilaterally, executing three, sometimes four, tasks simultaneously. But underground, below the symphonic fury of New York City, without a mostly-reliable internet connection, one is free from distractions, even if only fleetingly. With Pocket or Flipboard, the story becomes the singular focus. For me, everything else can wait.
More than this, though, is the sense of completion such apps ingrain within me. As I've gotten older, tiptoeing into my 30s, I've hungered for tangible markers of accomplishment. In the past, for any number of reasons, I would, halfway finished, discard a book eager to read a new one, or quickly skim through an article or essay with only a vague understanding of what was written just so I could join the conversation online, offering a sarcastic tweet or rashly-conceived opinion via text. There was no meat to the process. These were hollow endeavors.
But the sense of completion, of finishing a story before I reach my subway stop, has come to feel like a victory. A small, but necessary, one. It's the feeling of achievement, the hot rush of triumph, in a day or week of personal or professional defeats. And sometimes, that’s all I need to keep going.
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