These demands hit hard at our attention spans, which meant less time and motivation for reading, even though many experts advised this was the right prescription for what ailed us. Our normal patterns of working and socializing were demolished by “languishing,” a term coined by sociologist Corey Keyes, and what psychologist Adam Grant called “Zoom fatigue.” We all stressed about finances, jobs, our children’s education, and the basic right to pursue happiness. The pandemic changed the way we all think, feel, and behave. For many of us, reading anything besides the deluge of news-catastrophically bad, between Covid-19 and the toxic political atmosphere-became increasingly difficult, particularly for those who felt compelled to “doom scroll.” “For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next.”Īnd then a pandemic made it even more challenging. “In our society, where it is hard to find time to do anything properly, even once, the leisure-which is part of the pleasure-of reading is one of our culture-casualties,” writes novelist Jeanette Winterson.

The intrusion of the screen-first the big ones in our living rooms, then those sitting on our desks, and finally, the little ones many of us carry around- has made it more challenging to make space for the simple joy of getting lost in a book. To bake bread or whip up that recipe we clipped last year.

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