I have a theory that we love the books best that we have read whilst being ill - because of the ability to sink into them for longer periods of time. I still think it’s true.
I posted something similar on the secret blog under my pen name self - where I uncover that the act of writing has been superseded by the social media suck. Calling it a vortex is quite apropos.
I'm relieved to have another writer confirm that our time has been stolen by our phones certainly, and by our own doom scrolling. I too have found that I read less these days - too many posts and reels and notes to publish to introduce people to who I am, so eventually they'll buy my book.
The irony.
The very real problem with this - with more and more people not reading at all (because seeing the comments here absolutely reading an e book or listening to an audiobook counts as reading) is that you have less opportunity to develop the muscle of empathy. Part of the point of imagination is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. To understand that another human being is the main character in their life as you are in yours. And that others have felt the same, have dealt with similar problems. In essence, we read to know we are not alone.
Perhaps this is one explanation as to why we as a species are lonelier than ever, despite having the opportunity to make connections across the globe.
Thank you for writing this Tom - it made me feel less alone and more determined to dive back into my TBR pile - both physical and digital. 📚💻 Cheers and hope you're well soon. 🙏🏻💙💚🦋
Just a brilliant and inspiring post Tom. I personally defy digital and walk away when it’s pushed on me. I have a cell ( i love that word it’s so imprisoning) phone. I spend less than 4 hours weekly doing stuff like reading Substack. I love your SS posts. Patti Smiths posts are awesome too. Between the two of you I’m growing a monster shelf of books to read. Tom many of us completely understand your POV. We are readers, poets, musicians and lovers of animals and the natural world. These things smooth out the vriti - a Sanskrit word for restless water - of the human brain. It stops spinning. And then you open the door to read and write- enter the presence of Bach, and dwell in the 15th and 16th centuries. The music! The Theorbes! The luminous voices. I have bought real estate in this place. Im never returning to the modern world - except when i need antibiotics. As for writing, “I saw a wild Panda by the Village Church today … what a brilliant opener.
I do love real, actual books, but the combination of ageing eyes and cataracts makes it a real struggle nowadays, particularly when many publishers insist on these modern, spare, greyish fonts. So I do have an e-reader and a reading app on my phone and then can make the background brighter or the font more bold. I read an average of 2/3 books a week. Nothing terribly improving, mostly crime with the odd foray into something lighter between them. But it’s an important part of my life and I feel bereft when I haven’t got a book on the go.
I just had one of my cataracts operated on; the next one will be dealt with in a few weeks. Oh my God—the difference already in the one eye is stunning. I haven’t been able to read books for at least three years. Now I can. It’s amazing. One of the great joys of life has been returned to me.
I've started 'reading' lots of audio books (happily, free from my library, so affordable!). One accompanies me through many boring or lonely activities. Although, not so great during lawn mowing, which is a pity because that is particularly tedious, and large.
After a long layoff, I’ve forced myself to avoid the teevee and read books instead. I’ve recently dug into Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, and John Updike, picking up several of their books and a few others for a song at our excellent local used bookshop. I find that I have to be intentional about reading or I’ll easily slip back into the old (new) habits of scrolling and mindlessly flipping through Netflix shows. Thanks for the reminder to put down this phone and head to my reading corner.
There’s some wonderful lines in this post. My personal favourite is the ‘two torpedoes to the heart’ - referring to how differently you respond to novels now that you’re older 🫶🏻
What was your reading life like as a child? As a schoolteacher in 2024, I’m battling my students, trying to get them to read something more than a few speech bubbles in a comic book written for much younger kids. Their attention is constantly being pulled into the potential of something bigger and better online. I find that my students really struggle with sitting in silence for more than a few minutes.
Adrian, my daughter used to love the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. She's having the same issue with my grandson-prefers graphic books rather than chapter books. She's encouraging him to read Encyclopedia Brown and some other she's found. Not sure what the answer is, though, I'm sure I'd be rich if I knew. I know, for me, I used to be able to read for HOURS, but i think the digital age has really lessened my attention span so I force myself to read for longer than 5 minutes and to really focus on the book at hand. I'm getting better. Good luck. Teachers are saints in sensible shoes!
You are spot on! If I can feel my own, Elder Millennial attention span atrophying, then I can only imagine what my Generation Alpha students are experiencing. Everything is so fast, instant gratification, notifications, that they have no practice with letting things develop.
As a kid, Redwall was an intimidating book for my dyslexic brain. It is a big book! And, it’s a huge series! But when I found it on audiobook CDs, I couldn’t stop listening. I followed along and time seemed to stop as I fell into the story’s adventure. I want that feeling for my students.
Both my husband and I are avid readers, a passion discovered in early years and never discarded. It has been (is) one of the most bewildering disappointments of my and our lives that our son is *not* a reader. He is 17 and adored books as a child, we read out loud to each other— used to choose a “family book” and take turns reading a chapter every evening, and switched happily between English-language books and German-language books (our household having plenty of both).
So we did everything “right” and yet… he struggles to finish most novels now and almost never takes a book in his hand voluntarily.
Exception: mangas and graphic novels. Too many written words overwhelm him. And his attention span is insufficient for audiobooks. Yes, he also has ADHD, but… it’s more than that. Even the school curricula have “dumbed down” to cater to students with Tik-Tok-length attention spans.
I am trying to come to peace with my nearly-adult son *not* reading. It’s so hard.
this is such a great read, full of things that resonate with me (although I'm sorry you're down with covid and hope you feel better soon!) the way we're reading--or not--is always percolating in the back of my mind over the course of the last few years. and I've been musing about it here and there in my own work because there's something about the way we need to be present, which I feel you're touching on, that feels so important. even if it's a presence with ourselves, it's a way of stepping away from this sort of abstracted existence of social media. I recently re-read Walter Benjamin's essay, The Storyteller, and it hit me so hard how he delineated the difference between information and storytelling...in 1936. I think this may be a huge piece in the way we read (and maybe even write, really), and how social media has changed this. and it changes our relationships to each other, too, which is something storytelling is so good at building. I guess my belief is that it's especially important to find our way back to that.
Covid at the beginning of this month was instrumental in my finishing "Ducks, Newburyport" which had been staring at me from my shelf ever since it was published. I remember buying it from a bookseller who knew me a bit and knew my music and she almost didn't sell it to me. She said, "Are you sure you want to buy this? It's a pretty intense book." I'm not sure what she meant by that. Did I seem like someone who only read beach fiction? Or did I seem a bit too Pollyanna -- like the author's constant reflection on doom would be too much for me? Or did I just seem a bit of an airhead? I felt I needed a copies of my diplomas in my back pocket. I bought the book despite being discouraged by my friend (were we really friends?) and I have to say that it's one of my favorite books now. And, as an avid reader, that's high praise. They were 999 pages I will never forget and the protagonist's voice is part of me now. I'm sorry you have been so sick. I know exactly what you mean about the death grip covid can have. My husband came into the room asking if I was moaning. I was. I couldn't really think of how else to deal with the extreme aches and nausea I felt. Luckily I had a really long and intense book for the times when I wasn't moaning. I hope you will feel stronger soon. And I'm going to look into the books you read while you were sick. It's great to have your thoughts on books since I am such a fan of your books. Wishing you the best, always.
Me too! Ducks, Newburyport - the absolute sine qua non of a novel that requires total surrender - and repays that submission in abundant coin of insights and experiences
I just read the same books over and over and over for years and years. It feels like a kind of failure and I sometimes try to read a new book but have become too picky I guess and always give up in favor of rereading my favorites. But after reading this I feel a little better because at least I’m reading.
I’m exactly the same way. Once you’ve read something that is “great” for you, anything else feels like a book written for an alternate and slightly worse universe.
Just wanted you to know I’ve been listening to your narration in 21st century yokel on Audible and it is so fabulous. I’ve been going thru hell trying to get unpacked in my new apartment and listening to you has really lifted my spirits. As a big fan of Phil Rickman (I do his on Audible as well), I love the British accents, the vocal cadence, the vocabulary, and the visuals I get from good British writing. It is so different from we get here in the U.S.
Tom, Tom, Tom, your brilliant turns of phrase make me want to cancel my own paltry Substack offerings and redirect everyone to you instead. While we decry the online or electronic versions of words on a page, it's still reading, it's still marvelling at the imaginations and fancies of others, it's still empathizing vicariously.
I wonder if those eminently quotable descriptions, which give me such joy, spring full blown into your mind or if you labour, elbows on the kitchen table and fingers clutching your hair and pencil, writing, erasing and rewriting until it's just so.
All my life I've been the child, and then the parent, whose attention cannot be captured by a call to dinner when I am immersed in a book. If I am ever caught awaiting a ferry, or a plane, or on a beach without a book I start to twitch and panic at the endless hours without something to read.
Thank you for the writing you do, and share with all of us -- readers to the end!
This spoke right to my heart (and my navel, I might add.) Right now, I am reading Heather Cox Richardson's Awakening Democracy and when I'm on the treadmill, I'm reading Nathan Goodwin's Hollywood Strangler. At my bedside it's We're In For It, the First Battle of Kernstown, where an ancestor was with the 110th Pennsylvania and died in April 1862 of wounds he suffered at that battle. Keep on reading!!
Jhumpa Lahiri is phenomenal, and I suggest to all that they not sleep on her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. I read it at about the same time I read Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector, when I was in graduate school to get my Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing, and I distinctly remember those two books specifically making me think that if this was the bar, I would never get over it. This has so far proved to be accurate, because I never found anyone interested in publishing my thesis (a story from which I've published on Substack, because why not), but I'm now working as the Collection Assistant in a museum in the section of Mollusks where I work with seashells all day, so in some tangential, Jungian synchonic way my path was always before me.
I have a theory that we love the books best that we have read whilst being ill - because of the ability to sink into them for longer periods of time. I still think it’s true.
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
I posted something similar on the secret blog under my pen name self - where I uncover that the act of writing has been superseded by the social media suck. Calling it a vortex is quite apropos.
I'm relieved to have another writer confirm that our time has been stolen by our phones certainly, and by our own doom scrolling. I too have found that I read less these days - too many posts and reels and notes to publish to introduce people to who I am, so eventually they'll buy my book.
The irony.
The very real problem with this - with more and more people not reading at all (because seeing the comments here absolutely reading an e book or listening to an audiobook counts as reading) is that you have less opportunity to develop the muscle of empathy. Part of the point of imagination is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. To understand that another human being is the main character in their life as you are in yours. And that others have felt the same, have dealt with similar problems. In essence, we read to know we are not alone.
Perhaps this is one explanation as to why we as a species are lonelier than ever, despite having the opportunity to make connections across the globe.
Thank you for writing this Tom - it made me feel less alone and more determined to dive back into my TBR pile - both physical and digital. 📚💻 Cheers and hope you're well soon. 🙏🏻💙💚🦋
Just a brilliant and inspiring post Tom. I personally defy digital and walk away when it’s pushed on me. I have a cell ( i love that word it’s so imprisoning) phone. I spend less than 4 hours weekly doing stuff like reading Substack. I love your SS posts. Patti Smiths posts are awesome too. Between the two of you I’m growing a monster shelf of books to read. Tom many of us completely understand your POV. We are readers, poets, musicians and lovers of animals and the natural world. These things smooth out the vriti - a Sanskrit word for restless water - of the human brain. It stops spinning. And then you open the door to read and write- enter the presence of Bach, and dwell in the 15th and 16th centuries. The music! The Theorbes! The luminous voices. I have bought real estate in this place. Im never returning to the modern world - except when i need antibiotics. As for writing, “I saw a wild Panda by the Village Church today … what a brilliant opener.
The brilliant opener line- about seeing wild panda - thats pure Tom Cox👍lol just cracked me right up.
I do love real, actual books, but the combination of ageing eyes and cataracts makes it a real struggle nowadays, particularly when many publishers insist on these modern, spare, greyish fonts. So I do have an e-reader and a reading app on my phone and then can make the background brighter or the font more bold. I read an average of 2/3 books a week. Nothing terribly improving, mostly crime with the odd foray into something lighter between them. But it’s an important part of my life and I feel bereft when I haven’t got a book on the go.
I just had one of my cataracts operated on; the next one will be dealt with in a few weeks. Oh my God—the difference already in the one eye is stunning. I haven’t been able to read books for at least three years. Now I can. It’s amazing. One of the great joys of life has been returned to me.
I've started 'reading' lots of audio books (happily, free from my library, so affordable!). One accompanies me through many boring or lonely activities. Although, not so great during lawn mowing, which is a pity because that is particularly tedious, and large.
After a long layoff, I’ve forced myself to avoid the teevee and read books instead. I’ve recently dug into Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, and John Updike, picking up several of their books and a few others for a song at our excellent local used bookshop. I find that I have to be intentional about reading or I’ll easily slip back into the old (new) habits of scrolling and mindlessly flipping through Netflix shows. Thanks for the reminder to put down this phone and head to my reading corner.
There’s some wonderful lines in this post. My personal favourite is the ‘two torpedoes to the heart’ - referring to how differently you respond to novels now that you’re older 🫶🏻
Thanks Bea!
What was your reading life like as a child? As a schoolteacher in 2024, I’m battling my students, trying to get them to read something more than a few speech bubbles in a comic book written for much younger kids. Their attention is constantly being pulled into the potential of something bigger and better online. I find that my students really struggle with sitting in silence for more than a few minutes.
Adrian, my daughter used to love the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. She's having the same issue with my grandson-prefers graphic books rather than chapter books. She's encouraging him to read Encyclopedia Brown and some other she's found. Not sure what the answer is, though, I'm sure I'd be rich if I knew. I know, for me, I used to be able to read for HOURS, but i think the digital age has really lessened my attention span so I force myself to read for longer than 5 minutes and to really focus on the book at hand. I'm getting better. Good luck. Teachers are saints in sensible shoes!
You are spot on! If I can feel my own, Elder Millennial attention span atrophying, then I can only imagine what my Generation Alpha students are experiencing. Everything is so fast, instant gratification, notifications, that they have no practice with letting things develop.
As a kid, Redwall was an intimidating book for my dyslexic brain. It is a big book! And, it’s a huge series! But when I found it on audiobook CDs, I couldn’t stop listening. I followed along and time seemed to stop as I fell into the story’s adventure. I want that feeling for my students.
Both my husband and I are avid readers, a passion discovered in early years and never discarded. It has been (is) one of the most bewildering disappointments of my and our lives that our son is *not* a reader. He is 17 and adored books as a child, we read out loud to each other— used to choose a “family book” and take turns reading a chapter every evening, and switched happily between English-language books and German-language books (our household having plenty of both).
So we did everything “right” and yet… he struggles to finish most novels now and almost never takes a book in his hand voluntarily.
Exception: mangas and graphic novels. Too many written words overwhelm him. And his attention span is insufficient for audiobooks. Yes, he also has ADHD, but… it’s more than that. Even the school curricula have “dumbed down” to cater to students with Tik-Tok-length attention spans.
I am trying to come to peace with my nearly-adult son *not* reading. It’s so hard.
this is such a great read, full of things that resonate with me (although I'm sorry you're down with covid and hope you feel better soon!) the way we're reading--or not--is always percolating in the back of my mind over the course of the last few years. and I've been musing about it here and there in my own work because there's something about the way we need to be present, which I feel you're touching on, that feels so important. even if it's a presence with ourselves, it's a way of stepping away from this sort of abstracted existence of social media. I recently re-read Walter Benjamin's essay, The Storyteller, and it hit me so hard how he delineated the difference between information and storytelling...in 1936. I think this may be a huge piece in the way we read (and maybe even write, really), and how social media has changed this. and it changes our relationships to each other, too, which is something storytelling is so good at building. I guess my belief is that it's especially important to find our way back to that.
Walter Benjamin was right about so many things. One of my idols.
right? me too. I find I've been coming back to his work more than ever, lately, for that reason!
Covid at the beginning of this month was instrumental in my finishing "Ducks, Newburyport" which had been staring at me from my shelf ever since it was published. I remember buying it from a bookseller who knew me a bit and knew my music and she almost didn't sell it to me. She said, "Are you sure you want to buy this? It's a pretty intense book." I'm not sure what she meant by that. Did I seem like someone who only read beach fiction? Or did I seem a bit too Pollyanna -- like the author's constant reflection on doom would be too much for me? Or did I just seem a bit of an airhead? I felt I needed a copies of my diplomas in my back pocket. I bought the book despite being discouraged by my friend (were we really friends?) and I have to say that it's one of my favorite books now. And, as an avid reader, that's high praise. They were 999 pages I will never forget and the protagonist's voice is part of me now. I'm sorry you have been so sick. I know exactly what you mean about the death grip covid can have. My husband came into the room asking if I was moaning. I was. I couldn't really think of how else to deal with the extreme aches and nausea I felt. Luckily I had a really long and intense book for the times when I wasn't moaning. I hope you will feel stronger soon. And I'm going to look into the books you read while you were sick. It's great to have your thoughts on books since I am such a fan of your books. Wishing you the best, always.
Ducks Newburyport was a peach of a novel; it'd didn't feel like a 1000 pages long.
I felt so, too! Once I caught the cadence of the writing, it felt like a wonderful gallop!
Me too! Ducks, Newburyport - the absolute sine qua non of a novel that requires total surrender - and repays that submission in abundant coin of insights and experiences
Ooh!! I love your comment. What a perfect way to describe the experience of being a reader of this book!
Not sure if this article will be behind a paywall but I was deeply discouraged to read it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/
Unsurprisingly it’s happening on both side of the Atlantic.
(Also, I’m currently reading Villager - it’s great.)
I just read the same books over and over and over for years and years. It feels like a kind of failure and I sometimes try to read a new book but have become too picky I guess and always give up in favor of rereading my favorites. But after reading this I feel a little better because at least I’m reading.
I’m exactly the same way. Once you’ve read something that is “great” for you, anything else feels like a book written for an alternate and slightly worse universe.
Just wanted you to know I’ve been listening to your narration in 21st century yokel on Audible and it is so fabulous. I’ve been going thru hell trying to get unpacked in my new apartment and listening to you has really lifted my spirits. As a big fan of Phil Rickman (I do his on Audible as well), I love the British accents, the vocal cadence, the vocabulary, and the visuals I get from good British writing. It is so different from we get here in the U.S.
Thank you! So nice to hear.
Tom, Tom, Tom, your brilliant turns of phrase make me want to cancel my own paltry Substack offerings and redirect everyone to you instead. While we decry the online or electronic versions of words on a page, it's still reading, it's still marvelling at the imaginations and fancies of others, it's still empathizing vicariously.
I wonder if those eminently quotable descriptions, which give me such joy, spring full blown into your mind or if you labour, elbows on the kitchen table and fingers clutching your hair and pencil, writing, erasing and rewriting until it's just so.
All my life I've been the child, and then the parent, whose attention cannot be captured by a call to dinner when I am immersed in a book. If I am ever caught awaiting a ferry, or a plane, or on a beach without a book I start to twitch and panic at the endless hours without something to read.
Thank you for the writing you do, and share with all of us -- readers to the end!
I think we’d all like to communally forgive Viv too, if only for that charming final anecdote. Glad you’re feeling better.
This spoke right to my heart (and my navel, I might add.) Right now, I am reading Heather Cox Richardson's Awakening Democracy and when I'm on the treadmill, I'm reading Nathan Goodwin's Hollywood Strangler. At my bedside it's We're In For It, the First Battle of Kernstown, where an ancestor was with the 110th Pennsylvania and died in April 1862 of wounds he suffered at that battle. Keep on reading!!
Jhumpa Lahiri is phenomenal, and I suggest to all that they not sleep on her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. I read it at about the same time I read Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector, when I was in graduate school to get my Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing, and I distinctly remember those two books specifically making me think that if this was the bar, I would never get over it. This has so far proved to be accurate, because I never found anyone interested in publishing my thesis (a story from which I've published on Substack, because why not), but I'm now working as the Collection Assistant in a museum in the section of Mollusks where I work with seashells all day, so in some tangential, Jungian synchonic way my path was always before me.