Spannered Books

01. Start with shorter books and build up your reading stamina. Possibly your ability to focus has been sapped by other media. Luckily, this is a problem with a simple solution. The more you read, the easier reading will become. 02. Carry a book with you. I find it very unsettling when I visit airports and everyone—babies, kids, parents—is glued to a screen. We spend a good chunk of our lives in DMV lines and sitting in diners. You can get a shocking amount of reading done in those spare moments. 03. Read before falling asleep. This is actually where I get most of my reading done. Resolve that for the next hour or however long, you’re not going to look at your phone. There’s something almost hypnotically soothing about reading in silence at the end of a day. 04. Reduce the level of non-book entertainments. This is the main reason most people struggle with reading, because we live in a world of infinite diversions. Harold Bloom said, “There are enormous obstacles to deep reading now. The tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing.” But once you realize those diversions are the very things keeping you from reading, it becomes easier to prioritize reading as a hobby. Books are both good for the brain (in the same way exercise is good for the body) and more emotionally rewarding than much of what we consume. 05. Keep a reading diary. It can be something as simple as jotting down the titles of every book you complete. Seeing those titles begin to add up is enormous fun, and will motivate you to want to keep reading. 06. Remember that reading is supposed to be fun. There’s a reason books were the chief entertainment for American pioneers and British coal-miners of the nineteenth century. We once had a massively literate working-class, and I believe we could revive a culture of reading for pleasure.