My reading reset

Finding my way back to reading for pleasure and deep fulfillment—even when my brain's under siege

I identify as a voracious reader.

I’m the kind of person who brings four or five books on vacation with me. Who piles books up beside my bed (and on many other surfaces around my house) with the sincere intention of reading all of them “next.” Who loves nothing more than to chat about books with friends and co-workers. Who can’t walk past a book store without going inside—and definitely can’t pass up the public library if it’s open and I have a few extra minutes to spare.

Although I’ve devoured books since I was a child (I always carried a book with me as an adolescent—at baseball games, restaurants, anyplace I could steal a few minutes to read), as I got into my teens and early twenties, I lost the knack for reading for pleasure. I had too much required reading for school. Only when I graduated from college and found myself with evening downtime and no papers to write or tests to study for did I rediscover the incredible pleasure of reading for recreation. After that, I could lose a whole Sunday afternoon to a novel, or board a plane with the private thrill that I could spend the next several uninterrupted hours reading, without anything else to do.

Since then, reading was how I relaxed—but also how I understood the world and recognized myself.

How my writing life killed my reading habit

Fast forward to my more recent reality.

I tend to have several “currently readings” going at once. I check out stacks from the library out of habit, then am plagued with guilt because I don’t read them all (or return them late because I feel obligated to read them, which is happening more often with no consequences, since my town doesn’t charge late fees). This is yet another form of literary guilt hoarding.

Even when I sit down with good intentions to read, my brain immediately wanders off the path. I start wondering what else I should be doing, or what else I should be reading, and what’s happening in the world that I’m missing by sitting here not checking in online. Every night I slip into bed early, eager to get comfy and dig in to my book-in-progress. Within ten minutes, though, I’m almost always asleep.

A lot of this is happening because of what my smartphone and the internet have done to my mind—I can’t go five minutes without feeling that nagging sense of FOMO, wondering what shocking news or critical communiqué I’m failing to absorb because I’m sitting here in stillness and quiet. (Surprise, surprise: it’s never anything important.) Part of it is also my late-diagnosed ADHD, which causes the pinball in my brain to spring from topic to topic instead of staying dormant so I can finish a chapter.

But also, my writing practice has colonized my reading. I’m often doing what Phoebe Lovatt calls in her newsletter “carnivorous reading”: tracking down sources, hunting for ideas, reading with a pen in hand. She describes “hungry focused speed-reading” for purposes of work and research, which is something I identify with: half the books I’m reading are for my own research, or to support other authors—still fun and rewarding, but not the pleasure reading I was once used to.

Then there’s the anxiety problem—which is really a silence problem. On evenings when I finally have free time and the house to myself, my reflex is to fill the stillness with noise. There’s something about the sudden empty space after a full day, the pressure drop of downtime, that makes me reach for the TV remote instead of a book. My nervous system apparently needs time to catch up with my intentions.

My fragmented and frustrating routine of reading in snippets instead of deeply and with focus has become so disappointing to me that I’m setting out to change my reading practice with intention.

How to return to deep reading

In his Substack Intimations, author and teacher Grant Faulkner talks about the difficulty he found in luxuriating in reading a book the way he used to. Only by purposefully retraining his brain did he begin to feel “the glimmerings of deep reading” returning:

I realized that our brains have plasticity. They can be trained. When I was younger, I unconsciously trained my brain to read. Now, I’ve unconsciously trained it for screens and devices. So I realized that I need to re-train it for reading, and to do so deliberately.The word “rhythm” is important here because to read, my brain needs to move at a different pace than it does online. I need to find a way to transition to reading after a hard day’s work (or after a hard day of being attacked by screens, rather). Maybe I should listen to music. Maybe I should meditate. Maybe I should go on a walk. Maybe I should do all of the above. My online life is so intrusive that I need to consciously construct my environment to support reading in a way I never have.

The effort it’s going to take me to do this is worth it. Reading books—what Mairead Small Staid calls “vertical engagement,” because it involves immersing oneself deeply into a text rather than skimming across the surface horizontally as we do with the internet—is fulfilling and enriching in a way social media will never be. “Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time,” and social media is “a way to pass the time, not to live in it,” she writes in her essay “Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction” in The Paris Review.

Here are a few things I’m planning to try:

• Reading only one book at a time—but keeping a written list of what’s coming next, so I can keep the “but what about that other book” voice at bay.

• Dedicated daily reading time. I want to set aside a repeatable window, a couple of hours on weekend afternoons or weeknights, where I sit quietly and only read. Phone locked in the drawer upstairs. No laptops nearby. Just my current read, and a place to sit upright so I don’t fall asleep.

• Reading dates. One afternoon or evening a week, I want to take myself to a coffee shop or bar with no laptop or to-do list and just read. Just that.

• A reading soundtrack. Something I always play, so my nervous system gets the signal: this is what we’re doing now. I’m still workshopping this and am open to suggestions!

The bigger goal underneath all of this is getting back to a quality of attention I used to have. The pre-everything brain that let me sit still for hours without wondering what I was missing out in the world. I think of it as my mid-90s brain. How do I get back to that slower-moving, analog, not-knowing brain—and use it to love reading again? How do I use books as “mental medication,” as Phoebe Lovatt puts it, to heal my tortured, inundated mind?

I want to find the way.

How have you held onto reading for pleasure, or found your way back to it? What's worked for you? Share in the comments!