Nicole Junkerman on Reading by Water: Rivers, Coasts and Long Afternoons

Why the page settles by water

Ask anyone where they read best in summer and, sooner or later, the answer arrives at water. Not a particular stretch of it, and rarely the famous kind. Any river with a wall to sit on. Any coast with a little shade at the top of it. Any lake flat enough to throw the sky back at you. Nicole Junkerman keeps water as its own chapter of the atlas, because a book read beside it behaves differently from the same book read anywhere else, and the difference is worth understanding rather than merely enjoying.

What water does to a page

The effect is mostly to do with the eye. Reading is close work, and every few paragraphs the eye wants somewhere else to be for a second or two. Indoors it finds a wall, a shelf, a doorway, and gets nothing back: the room is finished, and looking at it returns no information. Water is never finished. It supplies a middle distance that is never quite the same twice, so the pause between paragraphs refreshes rather than distracts, and the eye comes back to the sentence rested instead of bored.

Sound does the second half of the work. Water is one of the very few noises that does not compete with a sentence. Conversation pulls language away from the page because it is made of the same material. Traffic is simply an interruption. But moving water is broad and shapeless and carries no meaning at all, which means it covers the rest of the world without asking anything of the part of you that is reading. This is why a book opens so easily on a riverbank and closes so often in a busy room.

Rivers, and the page that keeps moving

A river has a direction, and a book read beside one seems to take that direction on. This is not mysticism, only rhythm: something in the steady one-way pull of the current suits a narrative, and long novels tend to go well on riverbanks in a way they do not always go well on a beach. If the reading is meant to travel, put it beside water that is travelling.

A river also brings a city with it. Banks are usually a city's oldest and most walked ground, which means they are where its benches, its trees and its low walls have accumulated over centuries. In practice the best free reading rooms in almost any river city are on the water, five minutes from a street where nobody would dream of sitting down. The Cities notes keep coming back to this, because a river is the one part of a city that has never been redeveloped out of existence, and reading it is a way of reading the whole place.

What makes a good place to read by water

• Shade you do not have to keep chasing. A spot that will still be shaded in an hour, not one that is shaded now.
• Something solid to lean against. Reading upright is a short activity; reading against a wall or a tree is a long one.
• Water in the middle distance rather than at your feet. Too close and it becomes the subject; at twenty paces it becomes the background.
• A way to leave. The afternoon by water ends when the light turns, and it should not take an hour to walk out of.
• Enough ambient sound to cover the rest, and no more than that.

Coasts and the long afternoon

A coast is the opposite proposition. It has no direction, only a horizon, and it does not carry a book anywhere. What it offers instead is width. The eye can go as far as it likes and find nothing to snag on, and after twenty minutes of that most people's thinking loosens noticeably. This suits a different shelf: essays, poems, short pieces, anything that can be set down and taken up again without losing its thread. Books that circle rather than travel. The atlas keeps this argument in full in its entry on reading by the sea, and the water chapter simply widens it to fresh water and river cities.

The coast is also where the long summer afternoon makes most sense. Everywhere else, mid-July's afternoon is a problem to be conceded and waited out. On a coast it is the whole point. The air moves, which is the difference: even in real heat there is usually something coming off the water, and an afternoon that would be unreadable four streets inland is perfectly workable at the edge. A coast is honest about time in a way a room is not. The tide is a clock nobody has to look at, and an afternoon that runs from a high tide to a low one has a shape without ever needing to be measured.

Lakes, and the stillest reading of all

Still water is the third case, and the strangest. A lake does not move and does not sound, so it offers neither the river's pull nor the coast's noise. What it gives instead is a mirror, and a mirror doubles the sky. The effect is of enormous quiet, more than the place strictly deserves, and it is the best setting there is for the slow, difficult, rewarding book that has been on the Reading shelf since spring without being opened. Give it a lake and four hours and it will finally go.

The one caution is that still water is easy to over-romanticise and hard to actually sit beside. Lakes tend to be edged with wet ground, insects and no shade, which is why they show up in the atlas less often than they deserve to. A lake is worth planning for. A river you can simply find.

So the water chapter of the atlas is not really about scenery. It is about the small mechanics of attention: an eye that needs a middle distance, an ear that needs covering, an afternoon that needs a shape. A river supplies the first, a coast the second, a lake the third, and any of the three will hold a book for longer than a good room will. Find your water, whichever kind is nearest, and give it a long afternoon in the middle of July. The rest of the Atlas will still be there when the light turns.