Sure, we read less as we age due to increased life responsibilities, but the absolute, main, number-one, no-doubt reason I spend less time reading novels than I once did is the internet (I'll get it back, I swear!) and all of its tentacles. And reading is probably the best thing for me (and us) after diet, exercise and sleep. I hate it (as I sit on the clock online but instead reading this article online). Nice article.
Yes, when I'm reading at home, I usually keep my phone out of arm's reach when reading. But I also need my phone because I take pictures of pages and annotate them digitally when I see passages I like. With books I own, I can do this by hand, but not for books borrowed from the library.
That's one of the reasons I got a projector to watch movies. When watching on laptops, I noticed it sometimes took me 5 hours to watch a 2 hour movie b/c I'd constantly get distracted by having computer access right at my fingertips. But with a projector, I have to just sit there, almost as if I'm in a theatre. I put my phone out of reach, and I'm then distraction-free.
When I was unemployed, I didnt do anything but sleep and snack. It was only when I got a new job that I've started reading. I listen to audiobooks at work and tend to finish a book over the course of a week or so. I also have a kindle that I will read while at home.
I dunno how I got into reading as an adult. I only average about 30 books a year and mostly read nonfiction. I didn't read in my early 20s because I felt that SFF was too white. It wasnt until I started using my Kindle + audiobooks in like 2017 that my reading picked up a lot. Now I almost exclusively read books by white authors 🙃 I dont think SFF is as white these days, but I have found contemporary fiction to be very poor quality and identity based reading has produced an overinflated sense of whose books should be read and why.
I hope you enjoy Seoul! Do you read Korean authors? I feel like Japanese and Korean novels are very popular in the US. There are a lot of Japanese novels about cats! :3
Thanks, my visit has already gotten off to a fun start. I should try to read more Korean authors. Most recent one was Diary of a Murderer by Kim Young-ha. Before that was The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
About five years ago, I got into the habit of having reading discussion groups with a friend. We were very casual about it, with being able to reschedule if someone needed an extra week, and we also divided the book across several meetings. The dynamic was very different from anything I've had on meetup.com though, in the sense that neither of us felt like we had to one-up each other. We finished the reading because we wanted to have a quality discussion and ask each other about things we weren't sure about, but we were also transparent about whether or not we thought entire parts of a well-revered book were dogshit. But even reading a book and realizing we have similar criticisms for why it was lame/crappy still isn't "wasted time", as long as we are able to have a discussion about how/why.
Other commenters here have already brought up the attention economy aspect of reading, but there is an alienating aspect of having to figure out your own literary interests without having to lean on something like a Bestsellers' list or BookTube/BookTok. And I think people can find the risk of taking the days or weeks to finish a book that they lack people to talk to about it can be more isolating experience than just doom-scrolling on a phone in a bar/cafe.
I'm willing to bet people are much more inclined to just marathon a bunch of audiobooks on self-help or biohacking because of the combination of saving time but also being insistent in wanting to consume something that they believe will improve their lives more tangibly (though whether or not it has that impact is subjective) than long-form fiction will. Seems more like a reflection of white-collar anxieties of falling short of reaching the Lv99 Optimized Self.
With Cat Person, it was funny and bizarre to see the whole country (or at least its online community) become short story enthusiasts for a little while because everybody was so desperate to be part of the discourse.
I hope you're able to find the time to keep reading! I, too, struggle with making the time for it, even though I know it's a deeply rewarding activity that brings so much joy to my life. I'm not sure if you feel similarly, but I chalk up most of my struggles with it to a lack of discipline. I used to read *a lot* in college, like obsessively - it felt like my world. But then I stopped reading literature for a short while, and it was like I lost the muscle. I was 'reading' the same amounts, but instead of books it was tweets, and texts, and listicles, because those forms give real bursts of instant gratification.
Finally I'm returning to reading novels, and longer nonfiction works, and I can feel the muscle returning. It's such a wonderful feeling. I really hope you can get into the rhythm with it!!
One would think that if shorter = better, short stories or novellas would be the way to go. But most short stories are kind of the worst of both worlds: too long to be a quick-hitter, but too short to say what a novel does. A friend and I have had discussions if novellas need to become more popular to fill that void.
I agree to an extent. But I sometimes find it preferable to engage in higher-effort timesucks like practicing piano. Watching a Youtube video on this-or-that aspect of jazz piano, taking notes, then practicing is more effort than just laying in bed and reading. But there's an immediate sense of accomplishment with the former that I don't always get with the latter.
I read a lot and my best advice is that it's fine to be selective. If you could shut a book right now and not care what happens next, then put it down and pick up something else. Kindles or Kobos with an Overdrive connection so that you can borrow library books are also a game changer.
Something I also try and do is challenge myself in terms of reading something different. So each month, I try and get at least two books from a different country, this month it's Nepal. It gets me reading books I otherwise might not read. I've found some amazing books that way, such as Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by an Angolan author Ondjaki, which is probably my favourite book of the year.
Sadly, I wasn't so impressed with I'm a Fan. Highly readable, but also rather cynical in terms of incorporating the currently trendy and the parts about social media were tired. At this point, the Messy Female Main Character trope is overdone.
Finally, even though we lost today, Carlos Corberán is the best manager in English football.
I'm a completionist when it comes to books, though (at least once I'm past a certain point). Every once in a while, I'll run into a book I hate so much I refuse to finish it.
I agree the Messy Female MC trope is overdone. But I thought I'm A Fan did it better than most of its peers.
If Corberan is indeed that good, he can look forward to succeeding ten Hag soon and also having his career tarnished!
Based on this, you’re primed for Stoner! He’s got a reading life utterly opposite to most of ours...and it doesn’t make him happy, though I think the book is also pretty suspicious of the value of happiness.
I think I get most of my reading done due to insomnia...but also because I’m a high school teacher, and I just devour books in the summer and over winter break. I usually average 55 a year, but it’s probably more like 30 something in breaks and the other 20 during the rest of the year.
Also, having a kid has made me weirdly better at reading? I’m up above 60 books so far this year...I think I just require less sleep.
I didn’t have Facebook in college but still managed to waste my time worrying about girls, listening to music about worrying about girls and watching 🎥 about worrying about girls lol.
I struggled to read for pleasure in college because of all the reading I had to do for my courses. I feel like the point you make about reading feeling isolating at times is poignant, especially when I was doing so much reading for college during the pandemic. All I wanted to do after a day of reading textbooks and essays was binge the latest Netflix/HBO Max drop so I could partake in the Twitter discourse and feel some sense of community. I also just read I'm A Fan - I'll be curious to read your thoughts on it, it was a very unique book, I enjoyed reading it.
I think it's totally normal to get burnt out on pleasure reading in college. The brochure ideal is the young scholar who has all the time in the world to just sprawl out on a big green and read all the great books, both old and new. But reality is that reading assignments are like treadmills set on full sprint and if you place one misstep, you fly off out of control. Then there's also intense expectation to socialize. I wonder how many people's independent reading drives are permanently deadened by this.
Is it possible that film and TV usurped literature as the primary mode of fiction consumption because they're just much better suited to narrative fiction? I don't know - there are a lot of things that film/TV just are inherently better at doing than the written word on account of having two simultaneous stimulus streams (audio + visuals) to work with rather than just words.
I don't mean this in a supercessionist sense, because the thing that got me thinking about this was my complete antipathy towards YouTube intellectuals. Yes, yes, that's an oxymoron, ha ha, but I think my real problem is that most of these videos are supposed to be existing in the realm of ideas, but they have to put *some* sort of visual on the screen, which means you either get a white person staring into a camera for thirty minutes or some sort of ridiculous costume drama. The written word doesn't have this problem.
Sure, we read less as we age due to increased life responsibilities, but the absolute, main, number-one, no-doubt reason I spend less time reading novels than I once did is the internet (I'll get it back, I swear!) and all of its tentacles. And reading is probably the best thing for me (and us) after diet, exercise and sleep. I hate it (as I sit on the clock online but instead reading this article online). Nice article.
Yes, when I'm reading at home, I usually keep my phone out of arm's reach when reading. But I also need my phone because I take pictures of pages and annotate them digitally when I see passages I like. With books I own, I can do this by hand, but not for books borrowed from the library.
That's one of the reasons I got a projector to watch movies. When watching on laptops, I noticed it sometimes took me 5 hours to watch a 2 hour movie b/c I'd constantly get distracted by having computer access right at my fingertips. But with a projector, I have to just sit there, almost as if I'm in a theatre. I put my phone out of reach, and I'm then distraction-free.
When I was unemployed, I didnt do anything but sleep and snack. It was only when I got a new job that I've started reading. I listen to audiobooks at work and tend to finish a book over the course of a week or so. I also have a kindle that I will read while at home.
I dunno how I got into reading as an adult. I only average about 30 books a year and mostly read nonfiction. I didn't read in my early 20s because I felt that SFF was too white. It wasnt until I started using my Kindle + audiobooks in like 2017 that my reading picked up a lot. Now I almost exclusively read books by white authors 🙃 I dont think SFF is as white these days, but I have found contemporary fiction to be very poor quality and identity based reading has produced an overinflated sense of whose books should be read and why.
I hope you enjoy Seoul! Do you read Korean authors? I feel like Japanese and Korean novels are very popular in the US. There are a lot of Japanese novels about cats! :3
Thanks, my visit has already gotten off to a fun start. I should try to read more Korean authors. Most recent one was Diary of a Murderer by Kim Young-ha. Before that was The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
About five years ago, I got into the habit of having reading discussion groups with a friend. We were very casual about it, with being able to reschedule if someone needed an extra week, and we also divided the book across several meetings. The dynamic was very different from anything I've had on meetup.com though, in the sense that neither of us felt like we had to one-up each other. We finished the reading because we wanted to have a quality discussion and ask each other about things we weren't sure about, but we were also transparent about whether or not we thought entire parts of a well-revered book were dogshit. But even reading a book and realizing we have similar criticisms for why it was lame/crappy still isn't "wasted time", as long as we are able to have a discussion about how/why.
Other commenters here have already brought up the attention economy aspect of reading, but there is an alienating aspect of having to figure out your own literary interests without having to lean on something like a Bestsellers' list or BookTube/BookTok. And I think people can find the risk of taking the days or weeks to finish a book that they lack people to talk to about it can be more isolating experience than just doom-scrolling on a phone in a bar/cafe.
I'm willing to bet people are much more inclined to just marathon a bunch of audiobooks on self-help or biohacking because of the combination of saving time but also being insistent in wanting to consume something that they believe will improve their lives more tangibly (though whether or not it has that impact is subjective) than long-form fiction will. Seems more like a reflection of white-collar anxieties of falling short of reaching the Lv99 Optimized Self.
With Cat Person, it was funny and bizarre to see the whole country (or at least its online community) become short story enthusiasts for a little while because everybody was so desperate to be part of the discourse.
I hope you're able to find the time to keep reading! I, too, struggle with making the time for it, even though I know it's a deeply rewarding activity that brings so much joy to my life. I'm not sure if you feel similarly, but I chalk up most of my struggles with it to a lack of discipline. I used to read *a lot* in college, like obsessively - it felt like my world. But then I stopped reading literature for a short while, and it was like I lost the muscle. I was 'reading' the same amounts, but instead of books it was tweets, and texts, and listicles, because those forms give real bursts of instant gratification.
Finally I'm returning to reading novels, and longer nonfiction works, and I can feel the muscle returning. It's such a wonderful feeling. I really hope you can get into the rhythm with it!!
One would think that if shorter = better, short stories or novellas would be the way to go. But most short stories are kind of the worst of both worlds: too long to be a quick-hitter, but too short to say what a novel does. A friend and I have had discussions if novellas need to become more popular to fill that void.
Because there are so many low-effort timesucks available to humans.
I agree to an extent. But I sometimes find it preferable to engage in higher-effort timesucks like practicing piano. Watching a Youtube video on this-or-that aspect of jazz piano, taking notes, then practicing is more effort than just laying in bed and reading. But there's an immediate sense of accomplishment with the former that I don't always get with the latter.
I read a lot and my best advice is that it's fine to be selective. If you could shut a book right now and not care what happens next, then put it down and pick up something else. Kindles or Kobos with an Overdrive connection so that you can borrow library books are also a game changer.
Something I also try and do is challenge myself in terms of reading something different. So each month, I try and get at least two books from a different country, this month it's Nepal. It gets me reading books I otherwise might not read. I've found some amazing books that way, such as Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by an Angolan author Ondjaki, which is probably my favourite book of the year.
Sadly, I wasn't so impressed with I'm a Fan. Highly readable, but also rather cynical in terms of incorporating the currently trendy and the parts about social media were tired. At this point, the Messy Female Main Character trope is overdone.
Finally, even though we lost today, Carlos Corberán is the best manager in English football.
I'm a completionist when it comes to books, though (at least once I'm past a certain point). Every once in a while, I'll run into a book I hate so much I refuse to finish it.
I agree the Messy Female MC trope is overdone. But I thought I'm A Fan did it better than most of its peers.
If Corberan is indeed that good, he can look forward to succeeding ten Hag soon and also having his career tarnished!
Based on this, you’re primed for Stoner! He’s got a reading life utterly opposite to most of ours...and it doesn’t make him happy, though I think the book is also pretty suspicious of the value of happiness.
I think I get most of my reading done due to insomnia...but also because I’m a high school teacher, and I just devour books in the summer and over winter break. I usually average 55 a year, but it’s probably more like 30 something in breaks and the other 20 during the rest of the year.
Also, having a kid has made me weirdly better at reading? I’m up above 60 books so far this year...I think I just require less sleep.
I didn’t have Facebook in college but still managed to waste my time worrying about girls, listening to music about worrying about girls and watching 🎥 about worrying about girls lol.
Lol there's no escape!
Sad but true lmao
I struggled to read for pleasure in college because of all the reading I had to do for my courses. I feel like the point you make about reading feeling isolating at times is poignant, especially when I was doing so much reading for college during the pandemic. All I wanted to do after a day of reading textbooks and essays was binge the latest Netflix/HBO Max drop so I could partake in the Twitter discourse and feel some sense of community. I also just read I'm A Fan - I'll be curious to read your thoughts on it, it was a very unique book, I enjoyed reading it.
I think it's totally normal to get burnt out on pleasure reading in college. The brochure ideal is the young scholar who has all the time in the world to just sprawl out on a big green and read all the great books, both old and new. But reality is that reading assignments are like treadmills set on full sprint and if you place one misstep, you fly off out of control. Then there's also intense expectation to socialize. I wonder how many people's independent reading drives are permanently deadened by this.
Glad you liked I'm A Fan too!
Is it possible that film and TV usurped literature as the primary mode of fiction consumption because they're just much better suited to narrative fiction? I don't know - there are a lot of things that film/TV just are inherently better at doing than the written word on account of having two simultaneous stimulus streams (audio + visuals) to work with rather than just words.
I don't mean this in a supercessionist sense, because the thing that got me thinking about this was my complete antipathy towards YouTube intellectuals. Yes, yes, that's an oxymoron, ha ha, but I think my real problem is that most of these videos are supposed to be existing in the realm of ideas, but they have to put *some* sort of visual on the screen, which means you either get a white person staring into a camera for thirty minutes or some sort of ridiculous costume drama. The written word doesn't have this problem.