A bathroom reader

I want answering nature's call to feel like an escape again

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (the pre-cellphone era) everyone’s bathroom had reading material. In some families this meant old copies of The Atlantic or The New Yorker. In other families it might have been Chicken Soup for the Soul, perhaps a joke book. I remember giggling over one book that was made up of a series of emails or letters to customer service departments for companies like Campbell’s Soup. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called but nothing, to me, was funnier than reading it while on the toilet.

These days, it’s less likely to find books or magazines in bathrooms. This is unfortunate. Even if you don’t spend enough time in there to get around to reading, the choice of toilet read in someone’s home is a fun glimpse into their personality. I’m intrigued by the family who can quote Foucault and regularly eats tins of fancy fish but has Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader (still publishing and on their 37^th annual edition) prominently displayed on their toilet’s tank or perhaps subtly placed on a low shelf within reaching distance. These are people I would like to hang out with.

Before toilet paper but not so long ago, people often wiped themselves with pages of old newspaper or catalogs—perhaps beginning the tradition of reading material in the bathroom. One 18^th century man was so productivity minded that he turned his bathroom time into an extracurricular course, making his way through the works of Latin poets.

Now we scroll on our phones instead. We look at social media—refreshing Instagram for the fiftieth time that hour—or check our email or respond to texts or post images that we, hopefully, took earlier. I’m not the first one to realize that phones are basically petri dishes. (We may have gotten better at washing our hands during the early days of Covid but how has phone sanitization escaped being a normal part of bathroom hygiene?) Paper, apparently, doesn’t harbor nearly as much bacteria as a phone or toilet seat.

In a reddit post about Uncle John’s one poster wrote, “When I was in my early 20s I lived with some guys from college. We had a rule that on beer nights, if you went to the bathroom, you had to return and share a fact you learned from the Bathroom Reader.” This sounds fun! Much better than pretending that none of us have any idea where a person might have disappeared to for one-to-fifteen minutes, returning soon after the completely coincidental sound of a toilet flush. Wouldn’t you rather they returned, light and eager to tell you what they just learned about the origin of silly putty?  

There are still new bathroom readers coming out and people do still buy them. Once, while using a friend’s bathroom, I was delighted to see that she had a copy of Joe Pera’s A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing But Using the Bathroom as an Escape. Magazines are another classic option—think of the bathroom as your personal doctor’s office waiting room and put out a selection of periodicals for people to peruse.

Author Rebecca Makkai recommends, with apologies, that people might read more short stories if they read them while in the bathroom (poetry collections too). In five minutes, you might have read a short story instead of going down a social media rabbit hole wondering if Mindy from high school is poly now. Did Jim, who you took one class with in college, have a baby and you missed it or is he holding someone else’s child?

You could have learned who invented the first fire hydrant! You could have read a joke that made you laugh! You could have read a poem that you think about years later and revisit when you’re having a hard time.

This isn’t an argument for optimization. Sometimes people do still read on their phones or watch videos that teach them the same things in another context. But bathroom readers invite a sense of timelessness into our days by nudging us to put the phone down and become unreachable.

There are increasingly few places that are just for us. This is the real loss.

A flight used to make us inaccessible until we landed. Wi-Fi and free in-flight texting has taken away the anonymity of the skies. The bathroom is still a place where people won’t bother you, one of the few sacred spaces left.

Most of us neither expect, nor want, another person to answer our call while we are pooping. I need to have a certain level of intimacy with someone before wanting to know that they’re texting me while sitting, pants-down, on the toilet. This is a gift. If we need an escape, as Pera’s book hints, the bathroom is still a place we can run away to.

What will your next retreat look like? What will you do in the one place where no one will come looking for you?

I am answering the call and do not wish to be disturbed. (photo source)

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Notes

I thought fall was here enough that I took out my air conditioner and now, of course, we got a 90 degree day yesterday. This always happens and I never learn.

On a friend’s recommendation I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman which is less a productivity book than one that urges us to rethink how we use and value our time. (Thank you for telling me about it,

Jamie Cattanach

!)

One of the things I loved was the way Burkeman urges us to think about time itself differently: Time isn’t something we can manage or control because we ourselves are just time, whatever amount we get to have over a lifetime. I’ve already recommended it to a few people and feel like almost everyone I know would get something out of it.

Over the last year of working on this novel draft I’ve become deeply aware of the way my own work and creativity flows. One thing I realized early on is that while I can sit down a write a lot in an hour, I need hours or days of blank space to explore and read and go for walks to refresh my brain enough to get that hour.

I’ve been saying no to more social events when I don’t feel like I’m getting enough of that time. It’s hard! Sometimes I feel left out! But being more intentional about the types of gatherings I go to has made me happier overall.

If what I really want is to spend time catching up with a friend one-on-one, I won’t just go to a group event she’ll also be at just to see her. Having a night job that makes my free evenings occasional and precious has helped with this (though there are also times when it’s annoying because I can’t go to some things I’d like to attend and still pay rent). Thinking of your time as precious can be inconvenient but also, ultimately, good.

May your bathroom hours be yours alone,

-Tove

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