Reading time: About 3 minutes
Wondering why reading matters? Guilt and discipline won’t get you reading. Pleasure will. Six ways to make books fun again…
My son is severely dyslexic, and he struggled mightily with reading as a child.
We could see he was incredibly intelligent, and we used every lever we could find to help him learn how to read.
We went through several tutors, who didn’t help, and an expensive psycho-educational assessment that gave a diagnosis but no advice. Eventually, we found a tutoring agency that cost buckets of dough and required huge amounts of time. But it worked!
Our son took reading lessons Monday to Friday from 9:00 till noon for a month and jumped two grade levels. But he had to do it again, and again. The cost almost broke us, so the agency let me observe the classes, and I copied their method for the months we skipped to save money.
He’s now 32 and an enthusiastic reader who probably reads more books than you — usually 30 to 35 a year.
The sad fact is many people don’t read anything — beyond their phones — anymore.
The numbers are grim
Cal Newport’s July essay “Why reading matters” pulled data from a piece by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022, and only 38 percent read a novel or short story.
The share of adults who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Among 13-year-olds, the proportion who “rarely or never” read for fun climbed from 8 percent in 1984 to 29 percent today.
Horowitch’s article about the death of reading ran past 8,500 words, which is either irony or a bold field experiment in magazine publishing.
Newport’s prescription is discipline. He wants us to treat digital garbage like junk food and book our reading into the calendar the way we’d book a workout. I understand the appeal of his argument, but it fails for many people, for the same reason gym memberships bought in January sit unused by February.
You cannot create enjoyment out of shame.
What the evidence shows
Here’s what’s left out of the doomsaying coverage: enjoyment isn’t the soft, optional version of reading. It’s the engine.
A British research review found that reading for pleasure correlates strongly with higher literacy scores, while reading for information barely moves the needle. One long-running cohort study found reading for pleasure was more closely tied to a teenager’s cognitive progress than the education level of their parents.
The physical evidence is even more interesting. Researchers at the University of Sussex found six minutes of reading cut stress markers by 68 percent, outperforming a walk or a cup of tea. A Yale study followed more than 3,600 older adults for 12 years and found book readers outlived non-readers by almost two years, even after accounting for wealth, schooling, baseline health and depression.
Two years of extra life, for the crime of lying down with a novel. If reading were a supplement, somebody would sell it in a gold foil packet for $89, fronted by a man who won’t stop talking about his mitochondria.
Why this matters more if you write for a living
Reading is the only professional development that works while you’re enjoying yourself. No registration fee, no breakout room.
Sentence rhythm can’t be taught from a rulebook. You absorb it the way you absorb an accent. Every time you read a writer who handles a long sentence well, your ear recalibrates.
Eventually you start hearing when your own paragraph has gone flat, and you fix it without being able to explain why.
But absorption needs a relaxed brain. When you read dutifully, checking the page number every few minutes, you’re processing content and missing the music. Guilt-reading is to reading what driving straight through the night is to a road trip. (Same route, none of the pleasure.)
Ways to make reading fun again
My top tip? Quit books you dislike, freely and without ceremony. Life is finite, and Jonathan Franzen is not your landlord. The reader who abandons 10 books a year will finish far more than the one grimly serving a sentence in chapter four of something dull.
And here are five more concrete tips for you:
- Read the trashy thing. Nobody has ever built a reading habit on a book chosen to impress a dinner guest, so read the beach thriller and the romance with the cartoon cover. Your brain doesn’t check your credentials at the door.
- Rereading is the most underrated pleasure in adult life: you already know the book is good, so there’s no risk, and you’ll still notice 20 things you missed the first time. Nobody can spoil it for you either.
- Run four books at once. Keep something demanding for the morning, something easy for the bath and an essay collection for the 15 minutes when you can’t commit to anything. Monogamy is overrated in reading.
- Put a book where your phone currently lives. For example: book on the nightstand, phone charging in the kitchen. This way, you’re not fighting your willpower so much as rearranging the furniture so willpower never gets called in.
- Stop counting. Delete the reading-challenge tracker. Turning books into a scoreboard is how you end up picking a 90-page novella over the biography you actually wanted, to protect your streak. That isn’t reading. That’s inventory management.
The thing about pleasure
Newport is right that literacy built the mental world we live in and that losing it would cost us something enormous. He’s wrong about the fix.
People don’t return to a habit that makes them feel like a disappointing student. They return to what feels good. If we want a reading culture again, we’d do far better to make reading feel like a hot bath than a set of squats.
So go find a book you’re a little embarrassed by, and read it in bed.
Something I’m loving right now
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My video podcast last week discussed whether you should measure your word count or your writing time. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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