The Last Book You'll Ever Read

On dreaming of death beds, reading about book burning, and thinking your way out of thought.

On mornings when my wife wakes up and says she had a dream, I say, “Don’t tell me,” which is what Joan Didion’s husband used to say when she’d had a dream. A second later, also like Didion’s husband, I listen to it anyway.

You know she really wants to talk about it when she says, “It was really strange.” The problem is all dreams are strange, and that’s what boring about them. They’re absurdist and follow no reason, like experimental jazz contemptuously disregarding rhythm. Dreams are a series of things happening with no why for their happening, the way children tell stories — then I did this, then that happened, then she said, and then...

Dreams in novels are tedious things I usually skim. I’ve read them done well in rare instances, but mostly they’re a nothing in the non-mind of a non-entity, a thematic metaphor the writer failed to fold into the dough of the story. I’m just as disinterested in my own night-time hallucinations. Dreaming tires me out; I wake up feeling like I haven’t yet fallen asleep. And my dreams are usually unsettling. Psychoanalysts among my readers can make of that whatever they will.

With all that said: I recently had a dream I want to tell you about. Hear me out (or don’t — you don’t have to indulge my hypocrisy).

I’m in a room sort of like my study, and it’s full of my books and papers, and as the dream begins (the way they all do, in media res) I realise I’ve been poisoned. I have five minutes to live. I call frantically for my wife and we have a tear-filled farewell worthy of a good melodrama. Then I turn to my bookcases to solve the last question I will ever need to answer: What should I read with my final minutes?

I panic, scouring titles lined up in an order that was useful when I had life to live but, now, offers no guidance about what I should spend my last moments reading. It seems like a question of principle, revealing what I value in literature and who I am (was) as a reader. I wake before I’m able to choose anything, which I guess means in my dream I die without choosing. There’s a little more for the psychoanalysts to play with.

The dream stayed with me after I woke up, through breakfast, while I tried to work, while I tried to read. I was re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which features a profound on-the-page rendition of insomnia and a weird tie-in to the dream I couldn’t shake.

In the novel’s footnotes,¹ Johnny Truant sleeps with a series of women (instead of actually sleeping), takes a bunch of drugs, goes the coldest of turkeys, and loses his grip on reality. He’s suffering the madness of the waking sleeper, whose each conscious moment feels increasingly dream-like. Meanwhile, a character above Johnny’s footnotes is trapped in a perfectly dark space with a novel and a book of matches. He’s probably about to die.

He lights a match to read by, but it lasts seconds before burning out, so he rips out the page he’s just read, sets it on fire, and reads the next page by that fading light. Eventually, he’s left with one page and one match:

“First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption.”

His eyes frantically track the words across and down the final page to that final word and the final full stop.

This scene of a man reading his last novel before he dies reminds me of Desmond Hume in the TV series LOST.² Desmond keeps a ratty Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend, bound by heavy rubber bands and not to be opened until it’s sure to be the last thing he does. “I’ve read everything Mr Charles Dickens has ever written,” he explains to another character, “Every book, except this one. I’m saving it, so it’ll be the last thing I ever read before I die.”

Remembering that, along with the still bright embers of the dream I’d had, got me thinking. If I knew a certain book would be the last I’d ever read, which book would I want it to be?

Any answer to that question has basically no practical use. The guy to whom Desmond reveals his reading plan says, quite reasonably, “Nice idea — as long as you know when you’re gonna’ die.” You’re planning for something that in most lives can’t be planned.

It does, however, say something about a person to want their final moments planned out to that degree of detail. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of those productivity optimisers, the ones living life in Pomodoro intervals of life hack podcasts, speed reading Tim Ferriss books, and spreadsheeting their bowel movements. It’s an attempt to exert mastery over mortality.

I recently heard something (admittedly, on one of those “life optimising” podcasts) that kicked me in the nuts then helped me back to my feet:

“Overthinking invents more problems than it solves.”³

I’d always believed that “overthinking” was a superpower. Excessive thinking let me avoid excessive failure. I was thinking my way around future obstacles, planning the perfect route through daily detritus, to eventually reach a resting place where I could, at last, stop thinking. For the last twenty years, month to month, week on week, every day, my mind has run for a finish line I was certain I’d reach. I’d failed to see that the race track was a hamster wheel.

Yet for most of that time, I’ve had living proof that this obsessive fixation on control is definitely not the only way to live fully and successfully. Every day, my wife quietly gets on with taking moments as they’re handed to her, responding with flexibility and good humour, satisfied in each experience without fretting over squeezing out every last utilitarian drop.

I know how she’d respond if she found herself in my dream with only five minutes to read the last thing she’d ever read. Where I’d panicked and ultimately read nothing, she’d go to a bookcase, see a book and think, That looks interesting, then pick it up and start reading. She’d have four final minutes of peace with her book and her choice. That infuriates me.

When I sat down at my desk this morning to write about the question my dream prompted, I thought I’d end up putting the question to you, my readers. I thought “the point” of this piece was to offer a literary ice-breaker for parties. This was the productivity part of my mindset, looking ahead to the future purpose of the thing I’m currently doing. But I felt unfulfilled by the directedness of my words and the artificiality of leading them to a particular point.

Instead, I considered the worry that drives me yet rarely leads anywhere profound. Profundity is probably like happiness, and the more you search for either, the further away they get. So I ended up writing this essay as a description of what is, not what could or should be. Maybe you recognise yourself in something here. Maybe you don’t. But it feels time for me to shed the armour I’ve been clunking around in, convinced it protects me when it’s just weighing me down. Because that’s what overthinking is: the avoidance of vulnerability.

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1. Footnotes are the perfect visual metaphor for how insomnia feels: you’re adjacent to the world, beneath what everyone else is experiencing as objective reality, your own exhaustion a running commentary that feels both separate from and more immediate than what’s going on out there, around you, in the world of the fully awake.

2. LOST isn’t so far from the place in my heart occupied by House of Leaves. Both are shaggy dog stories I consider two of man’s best friends. Throughout my late teens and early twenties, LOST was for me what comic books were for so many other young men, and what various cinematic universes, including Marvel’s, have become for recent generations.

3. I’m told this insight originally comes from Gurwinder Bhogal of The Prism substack.