Lately, it feels like every time I log on, there’s a new article or post bemoaning the state of reading. Some of it is genuinely distressing; some of it draws a bit more of a side-eye, from me at least. A Smithsonian headline says “Reading for Pleasure Has Declined by a ‘Deeply Concerning’ 40 Percent Over the Past Two Decades.”
I don’t want to rehash the content of all of these articles, which talk about everything from the lure of social media to the sad percentage of adults who read to children to the question of whether “performative reading” is a thing and what the term itself means. But I have been thinking about a different facet of the same topic: The people who read all the time. The kids who love books; the friends whose reading I simply cannot keep up with; the booming corners of the publishing industry, where dragons and faeries rule over all. Last month, I went to the Portland Book Festival, where the presence of Rebecca Yarros was unmissable: there were Basgiath War College sweatshirts aplenty, plus dragon imagery everywhere and women with their hair in elaborate braids that I began to understand marked them as Fourth Wing fans. The festival is always lively and well-attended, but this year, it sold out for the first time ever. And the crowd was a little different than usual, or at least looked that way.
Some people aren’t reading. But some people are reading a lot. Not everything is darkness. Publishing would not put out books like Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books if there were no market for such books. Last year, Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore was a bestseller. Char Adams’ Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore just came out last month. There are countless books about books, booksellers, publishers; journals about reading; gift items in the shape of books or designed to make you think about books; book-related tarot cards; bookish mugs and scarves and bags and magnets. Being a capital-R Reader has never felt as commodified as it does right now. Book people are clearly a market. There can’t be that few of us.
I find it hard to imagine not being a reader. I was that cliched kid who would read the back of the cereal box if there was nothing else available. I’ve read really, really random books out of sheer desperation, having underestimated my book needs on a trip to a place with no bookstore. Before phones, there was always a book in my bag; now I rarely carry a bag, but there is always something to read on my phone.
But I can also see that if only a few things were different in my childhood, I might have turned out otherwise. What if my grandmother didn’t teach me to read long before I started school? What if my house hadn’t been filled with books? What if my parents hadn’t allowed me to read anything I wanted? What if my mom didn’t read Le Guin and Tolkien to me? What if I didn’t get to make regular trips to the library? What if there had been social media when I was young? Any life is filled with these variables, the things that, had they been different, might have led us down such different paths. Some big, some small, some life-changing. I wonder what could change, still, for the people who take no joy in reading.
Becoming a reader, though, is different than staying a reader. When I’m thinking about these columns, sometimes I make my way through a series of blogs, websites, forums, newspapers, browsing around to see what people are talking and thinking about. There is always someone finding something new, and always someone struggling to sustain their joy. There’s always a list post made up entirely of obvious books and one that’s full of surprises. Now, especially, is the time of lists—all these best-of wrap-ups full of books I’ve not gotten to yet. (There are at least 50 titles on my list of “2025 books I wish to read someday”).
Still, even when I’m overwhelmed, overworked, stressed out, mid-move, missing deadlines, worrying about the world, furious at the world—in all of these times, I’m reading. Or I’m trying to read. At the very least I am putting the books I plan to read next into a stack in the middle of the room, where I can’t help but see them. Sustaining this habit is a priority because I make it one.
What keeps me reading? Curiosity, more than anything. What’s out there? What don’t I know about? What will I learn from the next thing I read—about writing, about history, about people, about a place in the world, about trauma and conflict and love and contentment? Where can I go in a book that I may never go in real life? What can I take from a book to use in my own writing? What will inspire me or make me cry or leave me so rapt that I don’t want to watch TV or leave the house or anything? Why does it do that? How does it do that? What else is out there?
What is it like to be in someone else’s head? What is it like to live in their space, to walk their roads? Reading, for me, is the single best way to experience lives I will never live. Watching TV and movies is delightful, magical, enjoyable, but it’s watching, and watching is different than reading. Reading, I’m in charge of the pace, how quickly or slowly I follow or race through the words. I’m in charge of casting, location, setting. The image that forms in my head may or may not exactly match the author’s description, but whatever it is, it’s something my brain—my store of ideas and visuals and references—cooks up to accompany the prose. Sometimes, it feels like practice for living.
I don’t mean to be too terribly grandiose. I have grown wary of the reading-is-good-for-you positions, the but-you-need-it-for-empathy arguments that seem to posit reading as a moral good. There are plenty of things a person can read that are not going to add to their own personal moral goodness quotient. I’m not reading because it’s good for me. Reading isn’t vegetables! I’m reading because I can’t imagine not—and because I want all the things that books encourage me to imagine.
What keeps you reading? How did books and stories come to matter in your life? Each of us has a story about how we got this way, don’t we?
I was a read-the-cereal-box-if-there’s-nothing-else kid. My parents were great readers who let me read whatever; my father once said of me, “She has the most catholic reading taste of anyone I’ve ever met.” He didn’t say a whole lot complimentary about me, so I treasure that.
I write because not writing makes me crabby. I read because not reading would make me insane. Or so depressed I couldn’t function at all. I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t read. I just can’t.
I’m a former read-the-cereal-box type. I have, at times, read multiple door-stop novels in a single day essentially without stopping. But I can’t do that anymore. I still read, but I read much less and I sometimes now go for extended period without reading fiction at all. So the question is an interesting one for me from the other side: what changed; but also why do I keep trying to read even if it is now just a chapter (or less) at a time?
For the first part, there are several contributing factors but the biggest one seems to be that somewhere along the line I lost the ability to hyperfocus and now I find my attention span just doesn’t accept sustained reading very well anymore.
For the second, I guess I still find it rewarding even if I can’t do it so well anymore. I’m still interested; I still want to learn new things and experience new stories. Eventually that always overcomes the resistance and frustration that come from knowing that it used to be effortless, and now it isn’t.
I read to travel, to try out new minds, to fall in love and ride into battle, to have a thousand experiences I’d never fit into my own lifetime.
But mostly I read because my parents taught me to, the same way they taught me to use a spoon. I breathe, I eat, I read. It would never occur to me not to.
My parents weren’t huge readers but when I struggled to learn they did everything they could including private tutors to help me. We had a room dedicated as a library in our home the walls were shelves! They took me to the library weekly. They weren’t able to satisfy my desire to travel and my endless curiosity about the world, honestly not sharing in these things with me but they made sure I had the books to satisfy.
I am so very grateful that I was born into a household where reading was what we did. My mother was a teacher; my father read three newspapers a day. My little brother and I ignored bed time rules and read under the blankets with our flashlights — true librocubicularists! Our family sat together for dinner every night, but we all had to abide by the “No reading at the table” rule.
As an adult, I stockpile books to make sure that I will never run out. I have never met a bookstore I didn’t like – especially used bookstores! My husband and I regularly visit the town library, but we enjoy our home library the best. Books are the best way to explore different times and different cultures; they are bridges that connect us to other people.
Maybe people are just not reading . . . books. My husband reads a lot. Including books. But also, he follows blogs such as one on the history of the English language, one on biology, one on woodworking, and more. Solid nonfiction by professionals in their fields. But not published as books.
Yes this has been the case for me as well for some time I read much more online than I do anywhere else.
In addition to being the cliched kid who would read the back of the cereal box if there was nothing else available, I was the cliched kid whose friends were books. I had a lonely childhood; being able to escape into a fantastical world where my problems didn’t exist was something I badly needed as a kid. (With the times we’re living in right now, it’s something I badly need as an adult, no lie.)
The majority of my reading is still SFF, so a lot of it is probably still escapism. But it doesn’t get old for me. I’m thinking here of the “two cakes” meme that floats around fanfic discussions – just because I’ve seen the trope before doesn’t mean I never want to see it again; gimme that second cake. Sure, sometimes tropes aren’t executed well, so maybe it was just an okay read, but it doesn’t ruin the whole experience of reading itself.
And maybe that’s part of it for me, too; reading is much more pleasurable to me than watching tv or listening to a podcast. (Tv and podcasts tend to be harder, in different ways, on my sensorium.) So it’s a self-reinforcing activity.
Now it’s a habit: I need to read like I need to breathe. Even in times when I’m feeling incredibly depressed, when reading isn’t really pleasurable at all, I can’t not read. It’s a load-bearing part of my life.
As a former read-the-cereal-box kid myself, I honestly think that I keep reading because I’m chasing what reading was for me as a kid. I’ve always defined myself as a reader, and so there’s definitely also a part of me that reads simply because I think of myself as a person who reads. But more than that, I think it comes down to the ways that books shaped me growing up. I have been defined by books in a way that I have not been defined by anything else. There are so many facets of myself that I can directly attribute to the books I read, and so reading has become a very personal act for me. I think I also associate reading with the kind of overpowering, sweeping emotions I look for out of media—much more so than any other type of media—because my childhood is so tied with reading, in a way that it isn’t tied with other media like books or shows.
I think there’s also something to be said about the length of books. Because you spend so much more time in a book than you do watching a movie, you inhabit the world and know the characters much more intimately. You can experience a much larger range of emotions, and you can connect on a deeper level because you have invested so much more.
All of that being said, I really don’t read all that much. At least, not compared to how much I used to. I think there’s a few reasons that this is the case. Firstly, I’m in university now, and as school got more intensive over the years (and as I got more involved with extracurriculars) I have had less and less time to read. And, even when I have the time, I honestly can’t let myself read, because when I get really into a book all I want to do is read. I truly don’t have the willpower to do the homework I don’t really want to do, when I could instead be reading a book that’s drawing me to it like a magnet. I also definitely think there’s something to be said about the draw of social media, or just easily consumed media. Reading does take effort—you have to pay attention in a much more intentional way. The plot of a book only happens if you read it, whereas a show, movie, or youtube video will continue whether you’re paying attention or not. For me, the time sink tends to be youtube, and I think it’s the promise of a short time investment. I know I could just read a chapter of a book, but I love to immerse myself, and stopping after one chapter is hard. A youtube video, however, can be quite short, so it’s a lot easier to justify.
I’ve been having this trouble with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass! I thought it would be an interesting book of poetry by a queer forefather/icon … but I can’t start reading if I have anything to do because at the end of every poem I think… just one more! Luckily it’s a million little pieces, so lots of stopping points, but I definitely have to think about my other priorities for the day before I open it! :-)
I also hear so many people say they stopped reading for pleasure because of the nature of getting an advanced degree. It makes sense that having to read constantly for school makes reading for pleasure harder. You need something different to relax, not a busman’s holiday!
Thank you for another wonderful column!
I was a very literate kid, for what that’s worth. I moved away from reading books for a while in my 20’s and 30’s, but re-discovered the library in my 40’s. Now my friends can always ask “What book to you have today?” and I grab my bag and show them the book. :-)
When you mentioned that you read for curiosity, I thought about the “why” of my reading, and it’s literally just pleasure. Pleasure sometimes means something upsetting that helps me grow, sometimes it means beauty, often it means fun or comfort or distraction.
I think what got me back into reading, and kept me there, was the wonderful nature of my local library system (they pretty much order any in-print book you request, up to 20 a month!). Also, moving to a place with a newly renovated library just down the street, and fun library reading challenges helped. I experienced a work change that gave me more breathing room in my life, I got care to improve my mental health and joined my friends at book-only cons. Plus the glut of new specialty independent bookstores opening (or old ones thriving) in my city helped. Not to mention volunteering for a small independent library. Finding out that I could be a volunteer “librarian” was incredibly exciting. Oh, and public transit! If I’m not commuting by train my reading slows way down!
And I also want to emphasize what you said about reading not being inherently morally “good.” Literacy is incredibly important *and* people who are unable to read, who choose not to read, or read very slowly, or “only” read picture books or interesting websites or Facebook posts do not have a different value to the world than “book readers” do. I often feel that bookish people (like myself) tend to express shame about ourselves for not reading, or only reading “trash,” or feel pride in how quickly we can finish a book, or that we are reading particular books. I frequently hear people express nostalgic regret about not reading “anymore.” While we may be saying this about ourselves, the implication is that others should feel shame or regret about not reading “in the right way.” There is no hierarchy of value around reading, and I think that can’t be over-stated.
And from the disability pride/justice POV around reading: We live in a culture which uses “stupid” as the ultimate insult. But the things that we might commonly describe as “stupid” (difficulties with formal schooling, struggling with reading, speaking or thinking at a quick pace, misunderstanding or not doing what we’re told etc.) are not inherently bad. And if these struggles are associated with a disability, a person who is “cured” and able to read or speak at all or with more ease is not an inherently better person than the person who still struggles. Until we’re on the same page with this, I think we’ll struggle to have inclusive conversations about reading.
One last note: I am slightly wary of “I can’t *not* read” being voiced so frequently by book-lovers. I know this statement is deeply true and comes from the heart and soul! It certainly was for me as a younger person and has become again in my middle age. However, I remember running into the same sentiment in art school (“I make art because I can’t NOT make art!”) and it felt like an all-or-nothing standard I had to reach. If I wasn’t constantly, obsessively creating, maybe I should just stop, because that’s what makes a *real* artist… or reader. Just a thought.
“How do you know that?” is a question I often hear. The answer often is “because it is written on the box/tin/back.” And I read every box and bottle in the bathroom and kitchen, not once, but often, when there is nothing else. Not often to my comfort, for before becoming a translator I graduated in chemistry.
Reading books for me is watching a movie. I cannot watch any LOTR or Narnia film or whatever I once read (LOTR at least a dozen times, the book starts shedding flakes…) and loved because it would rob me of old friends, replaced by strangers with different faces, voices, gestures, habits.
I pretty recently read a book that is anything but high literature, but it was a fast paced action movie full of great turns for me that I enjoyed just like any”another bloody T-shirt movie” with Bruce Willis in its time.
There is next to no evening where I do not read in bed before turning off the light. Even if it is for a few minutes, reading helps me wind down. Well, mostly, because there have been a very few books that I could not put down, that I had to read the whole night through and go to work bleary eyed.
Reading allows me to not only live in different worlds and languages, but also in different minds, with different eyes or viewpoints on life.
And ultimately, it also helped and helps me feed my constant curiosity and hunger for knowledge. That was why I first started reading: on rockets, dinosaurs, fossils, chemistry, physics, astronomy – already during elementary school, which gives you a sense of what kind of a kid I was. (Fortunately, as a boomer, there were over a dozen children in the immediate neighbourhood about the same age, so I also spent much time in trees, playing tag, wading in brooks, carving things, later tuning mopeds, go camping, and having great parties …)
What I read, mostly sticks. And I read fast. These both together are an asset that helps me dive into new territory real quick. Reading is such an integral part of my life (and reactormag is one of my daily go-tos, btw.) that it is inseparable from who and what I am and what I will once be. I just cannot imagine a world without reading.
I have always been a reader and always traveled with a book or books. I remember going on camping and canoeing trips with the Scouts and packing 3-4 novels in my bag and inevitably having to borrow off of some of the Scout leaders when I ran out (this is how I ended up reading Memoirs of a Geisha at the tender age of 11).
Even now there is a joke in my household that goes, “Are you okay waiting for a bit? I have my book. Are you sure? *taps book*”, and it’s become even easier when I’m using my ereader because it’s such a convenient form factor.
Reading is one of the things that allows me to unwind and disconnect from everything around us, even more than gaming or watching film or TV does. I can’t go to bed without planning to read for at least 15 minutes. Since we cancelled cable, a big change is that I no longer put on nonsense background TV when I’m trying to kill a little time or eat lunch, instead I’ll put on music and pull out my book.
Like some of the other posters here, with so many more demands on my time as well as so many more entertainment options available, I don’t feel like I read as much as I used to, but I’ve still logged 60 books read this year and there are 3 weeks still to go, so I’m still reading lots. I’ve recently been thinking that one thing that is very different is that I reread books a lot less than I used to. Maybe its because I have access to a lot more via the library and being able to buy more. Maybe it is because the volume of what’s published in SFF is so much more as well, there always seems to be new books showing up on the TBR list that there isn’t time to go back. Ironically, I am rereading VanderMeer’s Annihilation right now for a book discussion next week, and I intend to finally read the rest of the series.
I read for entertainment. Though there have been a very few times I’ve had a point of contact with a character, I’ve always read and still read to find out what the characters are like and what happens to them.
Also, in junior high and high school, I’d take books to read between classes so I wouldn’t be bored all day, tho’ some of the reading spilled over during class, lol…I remember memorizing an epigraph from Tolkien in physical science class ’cause that was way more entertaining than whatever the teacher was talking about. Study hall was for playing paper football with my friends or reading because homework was for home.
I miss reading these days. For the past month I have been so busy working and travelling that I haven’t had the time nor the energy to read and I feel really sad about that. There have been breaks like this one before, but this is the first time that I feel like something is actually missing from my life. As someone who’s been an avid reader for over four decades I understand where you are coming from.
I find while working/travelling or just around the house and driving in my city that audiobooks like podcasts are a great way to get some reading in. I am selective in what I choose to listen to because I find it harder to focus on listening, finding that reading I focus and retain better the content.
I grew up a decade or so after the peak newspaper and magazine era when the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News and Life magazine were thick enough tomes to each make for an evening’s read in themselves. I have a distinct memory from around the age of four or five of opening the front door to get the morning papers (those were the days) well before sunrise as a street cleaning truck passed by the house. I would pour over the papers just to look at the photographs and adds and after first grade I would read and reread any paper or magazine that came into the house cover to cover. I can still remember the Life issues with glorious multi-page photo spreads of Fantastic Voyage and 2001: a Space Odyssey and a Free Press editorial bemoaning the fact that the Christmas retail season was now kicking in just days after Thanksgiving and speculating that we could someday see Christmas ads and store displays before Thanksgiving.
I think most of us read to both for escape and to learn more about the world. Also, I think everyone’s reading is a highly individual thing and much like spirituality in that no two people quite experience it in the same way. I also don’t think that reading fiction in particular is given enough credit as an act of personal creativity and all of us shape our immersion into a book and our experiences within it in a beautifully unique way.
Yes! I grew up getting the paper off the front porch and going to the mail box for magazines! My wife who is younger has a hard time understanding my love of the local newspaper (I grab one now and then and read online now) or why I still get some magazines in the mail and not on my ipad from the library (libby app!)
Thank you; this was lovely! I particularly like this: “I’m reading because I can’t imagine not—and because I want all the things that books encourage me to imagine.”
I was the kid who read the cereal box or newspaper/magazines with my breakfast. I read after school in a big comfy chair or under a tree. Furthermore, I got my personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut! I don’t read as much as I used to for pleasure thanks to work and kids (though I do read to them) I have a couple of favorite chairs to do this in as I did growing up. As then, I now read sci-fi and non-fiction primarily but also love travel writing
It’s the only way I know how to not be bored. My reading has branched out to include social media posts and articles such as this one but in my free time and when I’m procrastinating, I always choose to read. The times I am not reading it’s because I have work that I can’t put aside or I’m physically unable to read. [OK, that last sentence was just too hyperbolic but I still want to keep the sentiment and I don’t know (or want to figure out) how to rewrite it. Of course, I watch TV and do other stuff that may not be quite as urgent as work but is still needed to maintain relationships.] That’s how it’s been since I learnt to read as a baby and I hope that how it will be until I die.
My grandfather loved to read and shared his love of reading to me. He and I would walk around and imagine characters having adventures here. Maybe they live in this house here and stuff like that. I still do that when I walk or sitting in the train and imagine characters having adventures out there.
I got my love of reading satire from my grandfather and his old Mad paperback collection. My Mom kept it up by always making sure we had a subscription through the 90’s. I learned about censorship (and the importance of fighting it) through the story of William M. Gaines and EC Comics.
My Mom taught me the idea of projecting fantastical adventures onto people in the world. She would sit on the train and look across at someone and try to figure out what kind of royalty they were and what led them to be on this train with her. :-)
I can’t remember a time I didn’t like books, I remember my mom always taking me to the library for books and I loved scholastic school book fairs in school
I read because I can’t imagine not reading. I read a huge variety and that’s what keeps me reading. Fiction of all types, non-fiction, poetry, graphic novels – at different times of the day I read different things. So non-fiction in the morning when my critical faculties are most alert, fiction in the evening when I want to escape into different worlds.
I read as much now as I did when I was a teenager/young adult after a number of years when it was less because of family commitments which makes me happy because I have so many books I want to read. But I was the oddity in my family. No one else read to the extent that I did and we didn’t have many books. I joined the public library as a teenager to feed my habit and constantly asked for books for presents, with my mother often checking I really meant it.
As to why I read, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that reading happens at our own speed. Unlike films and TV it is easy to go back and check a detail or skim forward because this section is a bit boring. Or slow down because it is so overwhelming or speed up because it is so exciting. (This is my one problem with audiobooks and why I am so much fussier about them than other book).
So keep the books coming please authors.