The real reasons why you are not reading

On exhaustion, wrong books, and finding your way back.

Every few months, a headline mourns the “death of reading.” You know the ones: Nobody reads anymore. The book is over. The attention economy has won. Sam Rinko’s recent essay — How to Stand Out in the Post-Literate Age (& Help Reverse the Trend) — pushes back against that idea. He points out that more than 140,000 people are currently enrolled in an online course called The Modern and the Postmodern. We may not be reading the way we once did, but clearly we are still searching for something — structure, meaning, maybe a place to put our minds for a while.

Seeing that number made me think about all the times in my life when I wasn’t reading but wished that I was. Sure, when I wasn’t reading, I was probably glued to my phone — but the screen wasn’t the reason I wasn’t reading. It was the consequence. And when I really thought about it, I realized that not reading rarely has to do with laziness or a lack of discipline. More often, it’s emotional, physical, or directional — a sign that something in me needs rest, realignment, or renewal.

For me, the reasons usually fall into three categories:

1. I was physically or mentally exhausted.

2. I was reading the wrong books.

3. I didn’t know what to read next.

Here’s how each has shown up in my life — and what helped me find my way back.

😴 You’re too tired to read

It’s been more than a year since I started writing this newsletter, which means for many of you, your only encounter with me is as a prolific reader. Honestly, I love this for me. But I’ve gone through long, dry stretches when I didn’t read at all.

Graduate school was one of them — an especially disorienting time. I’d imagined that grad school would be an intellectual feast, that I’d be reading all the time. Instead, I was working constantly but outside the terrain that had once animated me. The processing part of my brain was in overdrive, but the part that sparks curiosity had gone dark. I wasn’t bored. I was depleted.

Issue 108: Giving up — on intellectual life after academia

Getting the hell out of that environment helped. Slowly, reading came back, almost like a physical appetite returning after illness.

A few years later, the first year of motherhood hit me like a tidal wave. I didn’t read at all. I could barely sit still long enough to watch a show. When a friend recently asked for books about early motherhood, I was genuinely shocked that she could even think about reading a month postpartum. At that stage, the only thing I was reading was the back of the baby Tylenol box.

I remember being so in love with my baby but so completely depleted - physically and emotionally.

And then, just as I began to surface, the pandemic arrived. My anxiety spiked; I tried to start My Brilliant Friend that first weekend of lockdown, and my dog-eared page still sits at 60. You all know I’ve since read the whole Neapolitan Quartet, but at the time, I was not in the right mind to receive Ferrante. All of which is to say:

Sometimes we can’t read because we are too tired to hold another thought. Reading requires a self steady enough to make room for someone else’s voice.

If you’re in that kind of season, please don’t force it. Reading through exhaustion can feel like swimming against a riptide. It’s okay to let yourself float for a while. Focus on your animal body: feed it, rest it, move it, soothe it. Reading will find you again when you return to yourself. Now, I see my inability to read as an early warning system — my canary in the coal mine. When I can’t read, I know something’s off

😑 You’re reading the wrong books

Nothing kills a reading rhythm faster than the wrong book. And by wrong, I don’t mean bad. I mean wrong for me, right now. Books I’ve read for the wrong reasons:

• To be “well-read.”

• To complete someone else’s list.

• To impress people I no longer talk to.

• To get closer to cute boys in libraries who turned out to be libertarians.

For a long time, I believed there existed an objective list of “good books” — a canon known by people more cultured than me. My job, I thought, was to track it down and work my way through it, earning my reader credentials along the way.

Therapy has been helpful, as has time and a healthy marriage that makes me feel seen, supported, and occasionally roasted in the best way. But mostly, it is age and getting older that have helped me feel clear.Eventually, you realize there is no list, that nobody knows what they’re doing, and that the only real authority you have is your own taste.

The books I am currently excited about.

Lists, I’ve come to see, are comfort objects — external scaffolds for our internal uncertainty. They’re a way to feel safe inside our reading life when what we actually need is to feel curious about our own selves. The older I get, the more convinced I am that no critic, no algorithm, no prize committee can tell me what to read next. The list you’re meant to follow is the one you make as you go.

🧐 You Don’t Know What to Read Next

I remember my early thirties as a strange transitional phase. My taste was changing, but I didn’t yet know what it was changing into. I wanted to read, but everything I picked up felt wrong.

Then I stumbled on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a quiet novel about a Dutch banker adrift in post-9/11 New York. It set off a chain reaction. Suddenly, I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Aleksandar Hemon, Dinaw Mengestu, Gary Shteyngart — books about immigrants, belonging, and the uneasy hope of America.

For the first time, I was reading to understand myself.

That’s how most reading lives reignite — not through discipline, but through resonance. You read something that lights a fire in you. When people ask me now what to read or where I find my next book, I think about how to guide them toward one gateway book — a starting point that, if chosen well, will lead to a dozen others.

Some good places to begin:

• Identity. Which parts of yourself feel most alive right now? Which feel unresolved?

• Life cycle. Where are you in the arc of your own story — raising kids, grieving, beginning again?

• Reading kinks. What kinds of books make you feel lit up — claustrophobic domestic novels, philosophical essays, female solitude stories?

• Lineage. Read your favorite author’s favorite authors.

• Questions. Start with something you can’t stop thinking about.

The trick is to make your reading life idiosyncratic, a mirror rather than a scoreboard. Look inward instead of outward. Let your own life become the syllabus.

If you’ve been around A Reading Life for a while, you know I thrive on projects — little self-devised curricula that give shape to my curiosity without killing the joy. Here’s what I’m working on right now:

1. 19th Century Wives Under Pressure
My slow-burn classics project. So far: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch. All portraits of women both trapped and fiercely alive. Read together, they feel like one long conversation about freedom.

2. Becoming an Annie Ernaux Completionist
Ernaux gives me the satisfaction of reading someone who has examined her life with surgical precision. My goal: join my “5+ club” — authors I’ve read more than five books by.

3. Feminist Dystopias
Inspired by The Wall by Marlen Haushofer — a book I think about constantly. Current lineup: Killing Stella, Orlanda, and Monte Verità. The mood: apocalyptic domesticity.

4. Psychoanalysis & Literature
Because I stan Adam Phillips. Reading him alongside Freud and my favorite fiction writers feels like creative therapy — gentle mind rearrangement.

5. Poetry & Anne Carson
Carson is my white whale: brilliant, elliptical, a little terrifying. My plan: read slowly, weekend mornings, coffee in hand, no agenda except to feel my brain stretch.

We don’t need to recover a lost reading habit. We need to learn a new one.

Most of us were taught to read within the safe confines of the classroom. No one showed us how to build a reading life that belongs only to us. That’s the real literacy crisis — not that we’ve forgotten how to read, but that we’ve never learned how to guide ourselves through the vast, unsupervised library of adulthood.

So if you’re feeling behind or unqualified, let me be the one to tell you: You don’t need a list or a plan to start. You just need to trust your curiosity enough to follow it. Because the truth is simple: a book is just a structure for attention — a place to put your mind for a while. The rest — the meaning, the plan, the syllabus — you get to build yourself.

🤓 Before you go:

• Are you in a reading phase or a non-reading phase right now?

• What are some of the ways you’ve found yourself reading the “wrong” books?

• And finally, what are your favorite entry points — those specific, personal gateways that could help someone in a reading rut find their next good book?

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