Before the internet broke my attention span I read books compulsively. Now, it takes willpower
Last month I texted afriend to ask if she wanted to start a book club with me. “What about a club where we talk about our favourite TikTok memes and viral dances instead?” she suggested. “I always baulk at the idea of book clubs because I fear it would show me up as being a bad reader. Have been on the same book for ages!!! I’m terrible!!! I scroll social media before bed, ie I am a BAD PERSON.”
I felt seen, to say the least. My limp attempt to start a book club was a product of similarguilt. It was early September and I had only just finished a novel I began in April. In the same amount of time the first Gulf war was almost over.
For months the novel sat atop a mounting pile of other, unread books on my bedside table, a stack that started as aspirational but grew into a tower of shame.
It wasn’t that I disliked what I was reading (Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room). But almost every night it was pitched in battle against powerful forces – my phone, my post-work bleariness and my internet-enfeebled-attention span – and the book was losing.
Reading books is something I was once did compulsively, willingly and joyfully. But as I get older and spend more of my life online, reading books has become harder.
Studies suggest I’m not alone – research in both Australia and the US suggests reading novels for leisure has declined.
I wrote a column about my struggle to read books back when I first noticed the problem in 2013. I was working as a newspaper journalist and finding my growing online life a distraction. Looking back now it seems like an era of calm.
That was before the Trump presidency, before I subscribed to at least three video streaming platforms, before Twitter churned into the maelstrom it is today, before online skincare diaries, daily news podcasts, advice podcasts, Marina Hyde’s Brexit columns, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram stories and before TikTok.That app – a never-ending dervish of short, ironic videos created by teenage geniuses – is the most formidable attention blackhole yet. Its promise of atomised, instantaneous entertainment is an enticing prospect at the end of a working day.
Technically, people like me aren’t reading less. I’m reading all the time – from the news alerts that greet me when I wake up, to the papers I get across each morning for my job as a news editor, and the endless mix of articles, emails, tweets and messages that fill my waking hours. But it’s the deep, disconnected reading of books that can slip from grasp.
I have been through periods where I read almost no books in a year, other times where I read voraciously, but mostly it’s somewhere in between. These days it’s like exercise: something I do in fits and starts, with varying levels of commitment, and only successfully with discipline.
Even with a cracking book, I can find my hand wandering for my phone, my thumb unlocking it and scrolling through some app, like a lab rat with her little paw on the cocaine lever.
When I do make the time for books, it’s infinitely rewarding. Going deep into a story – alone – feels like an antidote to whirring mess of online life and the ever-expanding intrusiveness of work. Like exercise, I sleep better and feel better and think better when I’m reading regularly away from a screen. My brain on TikTok feels like Doritos crumbs. My brain on a good book is a better place.
Carving out space for reading books can require carefully devised strategies to outsmart our own worst impulses and hold our work at bay.
“Before I have my end-of-day shower, I charge my phone, set the alarm, switch on Do Not Disturb and face it down,” one friend told me about his reading routine. “Then I shower, which is kind of like washing off all the digital gunk of the day. From there, screens (even largely TV) are banned, and it’s straight into bed with a book.”
“I play music from my phone through a Bluetooth speaker, and that stops me from subconsciously picking
it up all the time, because any alert would play through the speaker,” saidanother. “Don’t know why it works but it does ... Good if you can’t bear to leave your phone in another room while you read.”
For others it was all about incorporating their phones into their book reading habits – using audiobooks or apps – or being more discerning about what they read. “I’d totally lost the ability to read novels,” said one. “I reignited it by going back to ones that I really loved, to be reminded of that feeling.”
In the past what has worked for me is a combination of obvious things: the accountability of a book club, audiobooks, borrowing from a library to give myself a deadline, bingeing during holidays and choosing books that are short, familiar and more-ish to reignite the habit.
My friend who rejected the book club clarified it wasn’t so much reading books she was terrible at, but reading the kind of literary fiction serious adults might feel compelled to choose – books you might show off on bookstagram, books that make you feel like the opposite of a “BAD PERSON”. Or, in her words, “books about terrible people being being awful to each other” (I guess Sally Rooney is not for everyone). “They don’t even have any dragons or mead in them.”
There’s definitely something in shaking off the reflexive shame around not doing reading right, or the way we were raised to do it in school, and just tapping into the reading – or listening – you most enjoy. That’s going to be the most effective bulwark against the digital noise.
I finally finished The Mars Room when I had a weekend away at a house with a bathtub. Feeling both relaxed and thoroughly fed up with myself, I left my phone in the kitchen and filled up the tub. I stayed there with nothing but the novel, topping up the hot water until I had read the last page.
I emerged hours later, pruny and triumphant. Terrific book. Add it to your stack.
It’s the deep, disconnected reading of books that can slip from grasp