Hi,
These are all the books that I am in various stages of reading:
I had taken a week off from work recently, so I resumed reading two or three books from my unfinished pile simultaneously. I have to tell you – it was a bloody struggle. I felt barely literate. I mostly ended up playing tennis on my phone after reading two or three pages of Andrew Solomon’s first-person classic on depression, The Noonday Demon. Short of scented candles and crystals, I tried everything I could to muster enough calm and concentration, but nothing worked.
I wasn’t always this bad. Fiction hasn’t been my thing for a long time, because I find it too indulgent and contrived (I know, I know, that’s the whole point of fiction). But not so long ago, I could polish off a good non-fiction book without breaking a sweat. I actually looked forward to reading.
These days the thought of going anywhere without the phone is torture, but there was a time when books were my constant companion. My family used to complain about my habit of spending half an hour selecting a book to read along with lunch, even as the food grew cold. I have lost many a book to the toilet bowl.
Screen addiction could be the convenient culprit behind my current problems, except that I believe the love of reading books started abandoning me long before the smartphone era. It was in the early 2000s, when I left university after five years of studying English literature, that I started to become impatient with anything fatter than a magazine. There was a period in between when I was a veritable magazine addict, buying almost every glossy from airport bookstores before a flight. I still bought books, but I only attempted to read them out of guilt.
Most of my reading now owes to that same feeling. The only stuff that I read guilt-free and with concentration is whatever I need for researching a piece. I can still devour a 20-page article with anticipation and enjoyment – in fact I read dozens of long articles every week and even remember their highlights but the peculiar glee of finishing a book cover to cover, and chewing on the wonderment in silence afterwards, is dead.
Throw me a bone, will you? I know I am not alone in this, so tell me: what techniques should I learn to be able to read books again? I am desperate because I have a toddler who loves reading, and I don’t think he is ready to share my enthusiasm for The New Yorker yet.
Thanks as ever. (And three cheers for my first corona-free newsletter in a while!)
Until next week.
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