Stay Calm and Read On

Why do we read? Or rather, why don’t we read? Dramatic cover stories that would make James Salter roll over in his grave may overstate the situation. But they’re not going away. I’m guilty. I read less than I used to. When opening a book was once a reflex, now I reach for my phone. I have to create the time to read and make an effort to focus, as embarrassing as that sounds. And yet it feels like I’m devouring words all the time. Like everybody else, I’m all over the news, Substack and doomscrolling apps we know and love and loathe in equal measure.

We live in an endless state of real time, reading takes us out of time. We’re inundated with updates—anything printed in a newspaper feels like it happened weeks ago. Reading a book takes you away from the continuous hum of the moment. You give up something to the author’s imagination but get so much more in return.

It’s a bizarre situation for a writer. In one way I can connect to more people more quickly than ever before—here on Substack, on Air Mail, in many other places. This access is so much greater than when I started writing decades ago. An FT piece I do with James takes about a year to get in print. A book, of course, takes longer than that. Speaking of books, did you know that the first chapter of The Believer was excerpted on Esquire? Of course not. That would have been the greatest thing that happened to a writer in the 1970s. Today it was barely noticed.