It shouldn’t feel impossible to finish a book

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Screens have atrophied our reading muscles. Here’s how to get them back.

A horror story of sorts is unfolding in the United States. It goes like this: AI has made it so effortless to access information, and short-form video has made it so easy to entertain ourselves, that nobody reads anymore.

If you’re familiar with this tale, it’s possible, ironically, that you read about it. A viral Atlantic story from earlier this summer put a chilling headline on trend: “The End of Reading Is Here.” Teachers and professors, the magazine reported, don’t even bother assigning entire books to their students, because excerpts are good enough to prepare for standardized texts. The piece said we’re living in a “postliterate era.”

A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes.

This is a cultural crisis, yes — but for a lot of us, it’s a personal one. We’re all short on time, and we’d like to read more, but the ascendancy of attention-stealing tech companies has made it feel like we have less of it.

“Reading was and is a crime of opportunity,” said Leah Price, a professor of modern book history at Oxford and the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. “The limiting factor isn’t reading matter, but reading time.”

Reading is changing, not dying. The bigger problem is competition for people’s time and attention.

Print offers productive difficulty. E-readers and audiobooks make reading easier, but the friction of print promotes deeper comprehension.

Leisure reading should be fun! It’s totally fine to peek at the ending, skip boring parts, or just give up on boring books.

Losing the reading habit is especially bad because it’s a healthy practice in a world obsessed with self-improvement. Studies suggest that reading is an astonishingly good mental exercise, as well as a very accessible one. Reading, especially leisure reading, can improve your language skills. It exposes you to new knowledge and ideas. Reading can help relieve stress, anxiety, and insomnia. It can make you more empathetic and combat cognitive decline. Reading is absolutely great for kids. Reading, perhaps above all, also happens to be fun.