Repairing My Reading

I grew up with my nose in a book. As both an only child and an introvert, my natural habitats were bookshops, libraries and cosy reading nooks. I remember at primary school there used to be a pop-up book market every now and then in the hall, and I would bounce in my seat waiting for my class’s turn to have a look. I wrote endless stories, my head full of words.

So you can imagine my dismay when, about a year ago, I stopped finishing books. At first I blamed poor fits, then a change in taste, then a reading slump. But when the slump showed no signs of letting up, I began to panic. Feel embarrassed, even. I was a writer! Everyone knows that any writer worth their salt is a good reader.

I abandoned book after book, cold and uninvested. In desperation, I began forcing myself to read a certain number of pages a day just to make progress. I should have known that was doomed to fail, as it made reading a chore. But I was frustrated, and willing my love of reading to return. It was a personality trait of mine after all – people joked that I was always drawn into bookshops, like a moth to a papery flame. I was a reader. Hoarding books was my thing.

Thoroughly unnerved, I found myself browsing magazines one day and picked up Breathe in the mindfulness section. I’d admired its beautiful covers in the past but never read it. In my current state – a sad, bereft bookworm on strike – I was willing to give any reading material a try.

I kid you not, there was a feature in Breathe magazine about reading that made the penny drop. Thanks to digital overwhelm, we now expect instant gratification. The words we read online are condensed into clickbait hooks and scrappy captions, not to mention all the photos that provide most of the gist anyway. With so much of our daily reading condensed into short form, our attention spans are shrivelling.

As I stood in the shop, horrified and frozen to the spot, I wondered if this was the root of my problem. Was my doom-scrolling and skim-reading actually affecting my ability to focus on longer prose? I felt a bit sick.

I bought the magazine immediately – it had given me an epiphany after all – and when I got home I investigated further. I found a 2024 study published in Trends in Cognitive Science which talked about the ominous-sounding ‘Screen Inferiority Effect’. This essentially means we’re less likely to comprehend and remember what we read on screens than what we read on paper.

Do you ever notice that you can often remember where a particular passage was on a physical page? Books offer us more spatial cues, compared to the endless scroll of a screen. We’re also more likely to skim-read on our phones, rather than carefully reading a book line-to-line.

I had a flashback to English lessons at school, where the teacher fixated on a phrase or even solitary word for what felt like eons. Essay questions had us agonising over why an author had picked the colour red and the endless foreshadowing it represented. I stand by my belief that authors sometimes just plucked a colour out of thin air, but by analysing like that we reflected on what we were reading rather than skimming past it. A smidge more fixation could be a good thing. Less scanning and page ticking, more dwelling and pondering.

Reading has always been multi-sensory for me. That irresistible book smell and the click of a turned page are pillars of the experience. Another way it can be made more immersive is by reading aloud. If you’ve ever read a story to children, you’ve probably put on voices, paused for dramatic effect and made the experience generally more whimsical.

In times gone by when illiteracy was common, many stories were passed down through spoken word alone. Why not adopt that storyteller role for my own enjoyment? I believed it might help me get more invested in the world I’m in, but also introduce more rhythm to the words and slow me down.

Determined to face this alarming realisation head-on, I tucked a novel under my arm and went to the beach. It was a gleaming June Sunday, so as I read I introduced my shins to daylight for the first time in many months.

I was conscious of not skimming, rushing or being a millennial about it. Just soaking up the story slowly. Two hours later, I blinked back into consciousness to the feel of the tide tickling my feet, and had to skedaddle backwards onto dry sand.

Hallelujah! Maybe it was a coincidence and I’d finally picked a book I sparked with again. But I prefer to believe that instead of snatching a quota of pages throughout the day like I often did, I had carved out meaningful time solely for reading without distractions or micro-goals in mind.

I’d been so preoccupied with something to measure. How many pages do I read a day? How many books do I read a year? My focus had been on counting, rather than the enjoyment I got from the reading itself. The reward shouldn’t be about how many I ticked off, but the amount of attention I paid to each one.

It sounds obvious now I’m reflecting on it, but sometimes we need to be prodded back to even the simplest of habits. Clearly I can’t lounge on a beach like that during the week, but for that peaceful afternoon I felt like the reader I used to be again.

It would be wishful thinking to say I’ve broken free of my short form junk diet, but the important thing is I’m now aware of that slippery slope. With not a speck of digital exposure besides choosing the fanciest Wordart for her Powerpoint presentations, my childhood self took her sweet time over books, and was nourished by them.

I vow to keep her in mind and give myself permission to be the best kind of reader.

A slow one.

• Focus on time over page counts – Every now and then, dedicate a slot of time just for reading, with your phone on silent and snacks on standby. Make special efforts to savour each page.

• Read aloud – It might seem silly at first, but try it and see if it brings the world you’ve entered into more dramatic detail.

• Jot down passages you like – I’ve got a list of quotes that made me laugh out loud, or were just so well-sculpted they were like cupcakes for the eyes.

• Reflect before progressing – At the end of each chapter, dwell on it for a few minutes and see if any other thoughts come to mind about the story, character or ideas raised.