The Lost Art of Reading… And How We Can Find It Again
On a cool fall day in 2006, I was perusing the shelves of Barnes & Noble with my parents — a favorite pastime of mine. We found ourselves…

On a cool fall day in 2006, I was perusing the shelves of Barnes & Noble with my parents — a favorite pastime of mine. We found ourselves in the Fantasy & Science Fiction section, where I was frequently enchanted by the beautiful cover art depicting epic battles between men and orcs, space exploration to the farthest reaches of the universe, and magic that ignited the imagination. On that particular day, one cover caught my eye more than the others: Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. The art appealed directly to my 10 year-old sensibilities, displaying a man who looked like the progeny of a Greek god and the protagonist of Western movie wielding two ray guns while standing against the backdrop of an alien invasion. However, more importantly than the enthralling artwork, the book was a tome of over 1000 pages in length. The challenge of reading such a large story — more than double the length of any single book I had read before — was simply too good to pass up. My growing reading addiction had seen me progress to more and more difficult books and in that moment, at the ripe old age of 10 years old, I was ready to climb this 1000 page Everest that I found before myself.
When I attended school the next day, carrying my behemoth of a novel, many of my friends laughed and asked if I was reading the dictionary. They were shocked to see me reading what seemed at the time like an endless book. But for me, it was a natural progression of who I was and what I loved to do. I read. Hundreds of books. I was a reader.
And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t.
About one year ago today, as a then 23 year old, I looked up and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book cover-to-cover for pleasure. The 10 year old who was obsessed with books and was eager to tackle any reading challenge presented to him had been replaced by a functionally illiterate young adult. And yes, I do mean functionally illiterate, because what is the difference between someone who can’t read and someone who won’t?
Many former booklovers seem to have this same story or some variation of it. I have spoken to many friends, family, and colleagues who have had exactly the same experience. Why, then, is it so common for us to lose this passion for the written word as we age?
The Dangers of the Modern World
Imagine yourself back when you were an avid reader. You come home from school and evaluate your options — you could do homework, but algebra doesn’t seem too enticing. TV is always a possibility, but your favorite show doesn’t air until 9 PM that night. You could try calling your friends, but they’re probably busy with baseball practice or family commitments. Your attention is drawn to your bookshelf. You see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sitting there, promising a thrilling conclusion to the three-book epic of Middle Earth, filled with fantastical creatures, daring acts of heroism in the face of unspeakable evil, and the unshakeable companionship forged in response to an enormous challenge. Your choice is easy. You curl up in bed with your book and proceed to be enchanted by the world weaved by Tolkien.
Now I want you to imagine yourself getting home from work today. As you cross the threshold, before you even close the door behind you, your phone vibrates. Another work email. You read the subject and feel a jolt of stress, so you decide to leave a response off until tomorrow. As you cross into the living room, you see your roommate is already watching the latest episode of Money Heist on Netflix. He asks if you want to join, but you halfheartedly decline. You’re going to read tonight. You’ve made up your mind. As you meander towards your bedroom, your phone vibrates again. And then again. And again. Your friends have decided to fill your group chat with memes and gifs. Annoyedly, you silence your phone and cross into your bedroom. But your resolve is slowly starting to show cracks. You lay down in bed and reach over to grab the book off your nightstand… but the remote for the TV is just a little bit closer. And you really do want to start Game of Thrones after hearing so much about it. The series is based off a book series anyway, so isn’t it basically the same as reading? Your choice is easy. You curl up in bed with your remote and proceed to be enchanted by the world brought to life by HBO.
The number of distractions in our lives today is staggering. At any point in time, several different devices with virtually infinite amounts of content are vying for our attention, using algorithms designed by some of the brightest minds in the world with the sole purpose of overcoming our willpower and compelling us to look at our devices. In this war for our consciousness, we are severely outmanned and outgunned. As a result, it’s no surprise that reading, which once was something we loved to do, now feels like a Herculean task — that’s because it is one. When you attempt to fit reading in haphazardly, you’re attempting to confront each of these modern, scientifically-designed attention traps head-on and with no plan. This is destined for failure. But hope is not lost. We just need to go into battle with a strategy.
Reading for the Digital Age
Since my revelation in August 2020 that I had completely lost my passion for reading, I have read 37 books, with 34 of them coming in 2021 alone. I’m currently on pace to read 59 books this year, despite having read about 10 books for pleasure in the entire decade preceding it. I managed to do this through the implementation of a few simple strategies which dramatically increased the ease of integrating reading into my day.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
As stated before, our devices are designed, by brilliant engineers and behavioral scientists, to capture as much of our attention as possible. They are vortexes which absorb our consciousness, so trying to resist them head-on is a mostly futile endeavor. It would be akin to someone earnestly wanting to commit to diet who then carried a chocolate cake with him wherever he went. Even with the strongest of wills and purest of intentions, eventually you’re going to break.
A strategy that has worked quite well for me has simply been silencing my phone and placing somewhere out of my line of sight (sometimes outside the room entirely). Thankfully, despite their incredible complexity, our brains can at times be quite simple machines. Once I can no longer see or hear my phone, I feel much more in control of where I direct my attention. My mind no longer feels drawn to my phone like a heat-seeking missile in search of the next dopamine hit from Twitter or Instagram. This increase in focus makes the task of sitting with a book and centering your attention on the story significantly easier.
Swap Netflix for Novels
For many of us, the end of the work day signals the beginning of the Netflix binge. In a sort of 21st century Pavlovian response, we’ve conditioned ourselves to associated 6 PM with re-watching Friends for the thirtieth time. Reclaiming these after-work hours is a vital step in reintroducing a new reading habit. However, the battle to break out of this rut is difficult and may require some creative thinking. If your Netflix watching typically occurs in a specific room, try avoiding that room after work. For example, if you typically watch Netflix on a TV in your bedroom, try avoiding your bedroom until it’s time to sleep. Bring your book with you into another and enjoy distraction-free reading.
If avoiding the room you usually watch Netflix in is not feasible or is not working, you may need to take more drastic action. Canceling your Netflix subscription for 1–2 months will force you to free up your after-work hours and give you plenty of temporal real estate in which you can build your new reading habit. Ideally, once your reading habit is established and entrenched within your day, you will be able to subscribe to Netflix again without it dominating your evening hours.
A Trickle Can Erode the Mountain
Perhaps the most common reason people give for their reduced reading is, “I don’t have time.” Many feel that, if they cannot dedicate an hour or more to reading per day, it just isn’t worth taking up at all. I myself fell into this camp, feeling that it would be a waste of time to attempt reading without dedicating huge chunks of my day to it. And of course this thought process was fairly natural. Like many others, my most successful reading came when I was a child, and at that time, I tended to binge read books for hours at a time. This was the only model I had of a reading habit that worked for me, so I thought it was the only way I could rekindle my old passion. However, after running some numbers, my perspective on the time required to dedicate to reading completely changed.
For the purposes of this exercise, try testing your reading speed for free at http://freereadingtest.com. I’d recommend around Level 10 difficulty to approximate a novel. This will give you a rough estimate of how fast you read, which we will use for our calculations later. I myself graded out at around 341 words per minute.
Now note that novels will tend to have about 250–500 words per page, depending on the size of the page, size of the text, and spacing between lines. In addition, in 2017, the average non-fiction bestseller had about 273 pages worth of content. So let’s take the middle value for words per page and assume that novels on average have 375 words per page and that the average novel has about 300 pages of content.
Now let’s denote the reading speed you tested above as x and denote the number of minutes you plan to spend reading each day as y. To find the number of books you’ll read in a year on average, the formula is:
# of books = (x/375 * y * 365)/300
At my reading speed of 341 wpm, if I spent just 15 minutes per day reading, that would allow me to finish about one book every 21 days. That grades out to about 17 books in a year — from just 15 minutes of time! Bump that number up to 30 minutes and you get 34 books per year!
Now let’s extrapolate that out over several years. In just 15 minutes per day of reading, you will have read 170 books in a decade! With 30 minutes per day of reading, that’s 340 books! Compare that to your current rate and see how far off you are.
At my previous reading pace (totally inconsistent, sometimes reading a lot and often not reading at all), I would have been on track to complete around 10 books in a decade. The difference compounded over time, from this tiny, daily habit, is absolutely enormous. With just 15 minutes of reading time per day, I get a 17x increase in my expected number of books read. The impact on your life from a 17x increase in reading output really cannot be overstated. The amount of additional knowledge, insight, and experiences that you would gain are staggering.
Thrive on a Schedule
The most powerful way to increase the amount you read is to schedule it into a particular time in your day. As stated in the section above, you don’t need to schedule a large amount of time in order to reap huge benefits from reading. Even 10–15 minutes is more than enough time to accumulate a huge number of books read over time.
I’ve found the easiest places to schedule reading in my day to be either just before bed or immediately upon waking up. The consistency of location and routine at these two points in our schedule make them ideal for tying in a new reading habit. In addition, reading serves as a welcome way to either ease into the day or destress before bed, and will help you feel significantly more refreshed and relaxed than scrolling on your phone in bed.
Conclusion
Reading has become a lost art for many. Our attention is constantly under assault from streaming services, messaging apps, and social media sites, making it nearly impossible to garner the requisite focus to read a book cover-to-cover. However, we can fight back, and win, if we have the proper strategies in place. With the tools and insights described in this article, I’m confident that you’ll be able to overcome your inertia and dive into that book you’ve always wanted to finish. Happy reading!