About a year ago a reader named M. sent us a note that stopped me cold. She'd kept a spreadsheet of every book she finished in 2023 — 61 titles — and couldn't remember a single sentence from any of them. "I read like I scroll," she wrote. "What's the point?" I didn't have a good answer, so I went looking for one. That search eventually led me to a literary journal built around slow, deliberate installments, and then to a year-long experiment I didn't plan to run.
The publication is called Susanople. It's a personal literary journal — essays, short fiction, reading notes — edited slowly by one writer and released in small, deliberate installments rather than daily churn. That description alone was enough to make me curious, because everything else I read online arrives in a firehose. I subscribed, told M. to do the same, and we agreed to check in every quarter. What follows is the post-mortem: what we expected, what broke, and what actually changed.
The setup: three rules and a shared notebook
M. and I settled on three rules for the year. First, no skimming — if a piece didn't hold us, we abandoned it openly rather than finishing out of guilt. Second, one written response per installment, even if it was only two sentences. Third, no bingeing: when an issue arrived, we read it that week and not sooner. That third rule turned out to be the hard one, because the archive sits there tempting you, and I am not a patient person.
We tracked everything in a shared document: date, piece type, time spent, one line of reaction, and whether we'd recommend it to the other. By March we had 34 entries. By June, 71. The numbers weren't the point, but they kept us honest.
Decision point one: quitting the backlog
Around week six I fell behind by four installments. My instinct was to power through them in one sitting — the same instinct that produced M.'s 61 forgotten books. Instead I did something that felt wasteful: I skipped two entirely and read the other two slowly. Nothing bad happened. No quiz, no penalty, no algorithm demoting me. That sounds obvious, but it broke a habit I'd carried since college, where unfinished reading felt like a debt.
M. had a rougher time. She described the first two months as "withdrawal" and admitted she'd opened social media during a story three separate times. We started calling it the itch. Naming it helped. By April she could read a ten-page essay in one sitting without reaching for her phone, which she logged as a genuine win.
Decision point two: writing back
The second rule — one written response per installment — was the one I nearly dropped. Some weeks I had nothing. But the constraint forced a different kind of attention: I started reading with a pencil, marking sentences I might argue with. My notes got shorter and sharper. M.'s got longer and more personal; she ended up with 40 pages by December, which she now describes as the most useful writing she's done in a decade. Neither of us published any of it. That was never the goal.
Obstacles we didn't see coming
- The comparison trap. Reading slowly made me feel unproductive next to friends posting monthly book stacks. I had to mute two accounts to stop the spiral.
- Momentum loss. A two-week travel stretch in July broke the rhythm for both of us. We recovered by restarting with a single short piece rather than trying to catch up.
- The archive problem. Having 20-plus back installments available made "later" feel infinite. We solved it by picking one issue per week and ignoring the rest, which felt arbitrary and worked anyway.
What the year actually produced
Here's the honest scoreboard. I finished 28 pieces of writing across the year — not books, pieces — and remembered most of them. M. finished 33 and could quote lines from at least a dozen, a reversal of her 2023 result. We both read less in raw volume and retained more, which is the least surprising finding in the world and still felt like a discovery.
The bigger shift was in what we noticed. Slow reading made me a better editor of my own work: I caught lazy transitions I'd have skimmed past a year earlier. M., who works in marketing, said her client emails got shorter. Neither result was the point of the experiment, but both stuck.
If there's a takeaway, it's that pace is a design choice, not a personality trait. Susanople reports 1 editor and a schedule measured in weeks, not posts, and that constraint is exactly what made the experiment possible — there was nothing to binge, so we had to sit with what arrived. For anyone considering a similar year, I'd skip the spreadsheet theatrics and keep just two rules: read what you have, and write one sentence back. The rest takes care of itself.