Would you really be so surprised to learn that we are reading less and less every year? Last month, a
new study revealed that only 16 percent of Americans are reading for pleasure, which represents a 40 percent drop from peak rates just over a decade ago. (Terrifyingly, people are reading to their children less and less, too.) But in my corner of the internet, books don’t appear to have lost their status. Celebrities pose with them on boats and beaches and select them for their clubs and Bookstagrammers post towering stacks of their latest “hauls.” And though I surround myself with readers, it can easily feel harder and harder to make the time to spend with a book — and easier to buckle and give into distractions.
So I asked an assortment of well-read people — critics, authors, Substackers — to tell me how, exactly, they find the time for books. In doing so, they described their daily routines, their home-furniture setups, and their children’s extracurriculars. One thing that came up over and over: the relentless, almost inescapable attention-zapping evil of the phone. If technology is waging a war on our attention spans, these soldiers are well-prepared for the fight.
Molly Young, book critic and magazine writer
I treat my phone like poison. I leave the house as much as possible without it. After I had a kid, people were like, “What if there’s an emergency?” Every fucking person on Earth has a phone. I’ll ask the person sitting eight inches away.
Once you are released from the grip of your phone, you have like eight extra hours in the day and reading becomes way easier. It feels like a treat and not like something that you have to strive to do. I always have a book in my bag so that during all those interstitial waiting periods — e.g., in line at checkout — I’m reading a paragraph instead of doing nothing. I only read paper books. I don’t listen to audiobooks just because I can’t have things in my ears all the time because then I don’t have an internal monologue, which is really scary.
I keep a list of books that I read every year, probably between 60 and 130. Which doesn’t feel like that many, but I’m a slow reader, so that’s my excuse.
by Jasmine Vojdani, The Cut |
Read more:Image: AMC
