Finding the Time to Read

Maybe I should be calling this blog entry “Making the Time to Read.” What with the hulking mass of social media and multi-platform entertainment bullying for our attention, it seems harder than ever to set aside the time simply to open a book and enter its world, doesn’t it? I so empathize with friends who, after being kind enough to pick up my book Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill, confess that they find it a challenge to spend time with any book, because of things like “the crazy pace of life today.” Even the dedicated book fiends I know sometimes complain that their stamina for reading—their ability to sit still physically and focus mentally--is under threat.

Grimly, some conclude that human consciousness itself is devolving in some ghastly, new-media-driven process of natural selection—though such an alarmist conclusion is probably unfounded. In fact, some recent statistics say that the average pleasure-reading time of Americans over the age of fifteen rose a bit during the pandemic, to almost 17 minutes per day, which reverses (according to Wordsrated.com) an established downward trend in reading time per day. This is good news, and I plan to watch this figure. We can only hope that as the discussion about addiction to social media grows louder, more folks will try and make the time to re-cultivate their stamina for reading books and reclaim what Stephen King calls books’ “uniquely portable magic"....