By Ethan Maurice | March 11, 2021
In life, there are rare things that are both easy and good. One of those things is reading while you poop — a practice often less literally referred to as “bathroom reading.”
Bathroom reading rocks because it is such an easy practice to develop. You don’t have to rearrange your priorities or work to make it a habit or anything. All you have to do is place a book within sitting reach of the toilet.
You see, you are a human being, and as long as your innards continue to function, you are regularly going to have to poop. When that special feeling arises, you make your way to your toilet, sit down — and hey — there’s that book you left here to read when this happens! You crack the book open and read while your autonomic functions take care of business.
Walah! You’ve now got yourself a regular reading habit.
As the act of placing a book next to the toilet is pretty straightforward, the art of bathroom reading lies less in placing a book next to the toilet, and more in choosing the right book, or books, to place next to it.
I’ll save you the experimentation with a short recount of what I learned in my first forays into the art of bathroom reading.
I began bathroom reading in my teens when a book entitled Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader somehow ended up next to a toilet in our home. With a title like that, bathroom reading as a “thing” was suddenly very obvious to me. Throughout high school, I often read Uncle John’s random facts and weird stories while pooping at home.
The problem with Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader was that it was pretty much all pointless trivia. Have you ever noticed that the only difference between trivia and trivial is the letter “l?” That’s because they come from the same Latin root word, and basically mean the same thing. Trivia is a noun and trivial is an adjective and both denote that something is, “of little or no importance.” As I write this, I honestly can’t remember a single detail between the covers of the book, but online it is advertised to contain “real hillbilly recipes,” stories of “soda pop flops,” and information on “Webster’s least-wanted words.” There was no reason for the book to matter to me, and when I left for college, I left the act of bathroom reading behind as well.
It wasn’t until I pooped on the farm I WWOOFed at on the Big Island of Hawaii when I found a book next to the toilet and rediscovered the practice. The book was The Omnivores Dilemma, a 450-page treatise on how the food we eat impacts our health and the health of the planet. Every time I pooped on the farm that summer, the book was just sitting there next to the toilet, so I picked it up and read. It was fascinating, and I was learning about the pluses and minuses of food systems, but there was a problem: I kept forgetting where I left off last. Unless you really lack fiber in your diet, one sitting on the john just isn’t much time to read and I spent a large chunk of that time figuring out where my train of thought was last.
That summer, I probably read half of The Omnivores Dilemma twice, but when I left Hawaii, I took with me two valuable insights:
1. Reading things that matter while you poop is awesome and enlightening.
2. Bathroom reading is better with books you can just open to any page and dive in, otherwise, too much time is spent figuring out where you left off last.
I continued to travel and spread my time among places and it wasn’t until four years after Hawaii that I regularly christened a non-public toilet again. When I did, I remembered what I had learned in Hawaii and placed Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems atop the toilet’s tank. To read a poem only takes a minute or two. And Jack’s poems point to the roaring awe in the basic, in the real, in the most human aspects of life. Graced with Jack Gilbert’s perspective with every visit to the porcelain throne, over time, I noticed my perspective slowly morph to be more like his. Especially when I walked places, sat in the sun, or enjoyed other simple goodnesses, my appreciation of them became palpable.
To better understand, here is the sort of Jack Gilbert poem I was intentionally internalizing:
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
This is the true art of bathroom reading: to find a book that you can open to any page and read — that you want to impress upon your very being — and to leave that book within reach of the toilet. Because over hundreds and maybe even thousands of bowel movements, you will spend a bunch of time with that book and as humans are always becoming more like what they surround themselves with, you will inevitably come to see and be more like that book.
As I’ve basically used the same toilet for hundreds of consecutive poops during the pandemic this past year, I put more thought into my bathroom reading books than ever before. I currently keep not one, but four books next to the toilet that meet my bathroom reading criteria:
So, listen. If you’re feeling this bathroom reading idea, to get started, all you have to do to is place a book next to your toilet. That’s it. Preferably, this should be a book you want to mindmeld with and can just open to any page and start reading, but barring selection concerns, creating a regular reading habit could not be any easier. If you don’t have a book that meets these criteria, this will require the extra step of buying a book and then leaving it next to your toilet.
Bathroom reading is low-hanging fruit. Go place the right book within arm’s length of your toilet right now, and you’re on your way to transforming your perspective and life — one poop at a time.
