\n<\/p>\n
D<\/span>o you feel that it\u2019s harder to read than it used to be? Not harder to read emails, texts and social media posts, of course. We\u2019re reading those all day long. Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? How long is it since you even sat down with a weekend newspaper and read it cover to cover? Do you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit, everything from fun popcorn novels to serious nonfiction, classic and contemporary, many genres and writers, but somehow it\u2019s gone away? It doesn\u2019t feel like a decision that you made. It just happened.<\/p>\n I feel like that. At least more like that than I\u2019m comfortable with. I\u2019m a novelist and I present programs about thinking on the BBC, and yet even I am finding that I\u2019m reading less than I used to. It seems more of an effort and less of a consistent, persistent habit than it was. I hate this feeling. I still have the habit of acquiring books, buying them, getting them from libraries, being sent them. And I do still read. Compared with many people, I probably read an enormous amount, but I know it\u2019s not as much as I used to read. And I know where the time has gone.<\/p>\n It is, of course, the damn phones.<\/p>\n The other day I was sitting with a friend who is a doctor and an expert in public health \u2013 that is, large-scale interventions that might improve the health of millions of people by a tiny bit. I found myself saying: \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that smartphones are about the same size and shape as a packet of cigarettes.\u201d We talked about how the really massive public health crisis from tobacco was caused by the arrival of cheap mass-market cigarettes, which you could smoke endlessly without having to do the ritual of emptying, cleaning and refilling your pipe, and which were not as expensive as cigars. We talked about how people didn\u2019t know, when they started smoking those cheap mass-market cigarettes during the first world war, how deadly they would be. We talked about how it\u2019s not our fault.<\/p>\n My friend said that he too misses his regular reading habit. I think of him as an avid reader, but we\u2019re remembering each other from a few years ago. In the trenches in the first world war, men smoked cigarettes to steady their nerves. During the pandemic, when we couldn\u2019t speak to each other in person or give each other a hug, we all got glued to our smartphones. It\u2019s not our fault, but we are going to have to fix it now. My friend said that he wished someone would do a couch to 5k-style training program for reading. And then I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about it.<\/p>\n double quotation markDo you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit but somehow it\u2019s gone away?<\/p>\n The problems of people not reading are well documented. Students are apparently arriving at university unable to read a whole book. A 2024 report by the OECD has found that literacy has declined or stagnated in most developed countries. In his forthcoming book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott traces the problems for society that are increasingly coming out of a lack of literacy. Marriott argues that when we\u2019re not reading, we\u2019re increasingly unable to follow complex arguments and find the problems with them. We tend to be more swayed by cartoonish figures with simple slogans we can repeat. We will believe gossip and treat it seriously rather than thinking through the intellectual ideas behind politics or business.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a public health crisis of intellectual health, and most governments don\u2019t seem minded to do anything about it. It\u2019s the damn phones, but dealing with the phones means tussling with the massively wealthy American technology companies that are protected by Donald Trump. It would be straightforward to force technology companies to give us ways to use the useful services on the phones with all the pernicious features turned off. But it would take political will to do it.<\/p>\n While we\u2019re waiting, if nobody is going to do it for us, for now, we\u2019re going to need to do what we can for ourselves.<\/p>\n <\/span>Naomi Alderman.<\/span> Photograph: P\u00e5l Hansen\/The Observer<\/p>\n So I thought about the couch to 5k for reading, how you could do it. I worked on designing the couch to 5k for my running app Zombies, Run several years ago, so I know the theory. When I mentioned the idea on my Substack newsletter, Whatever Works, readers bit my hand off with excitement (much like a zombie). It suddenly seemed very urgent. There is no more time to wait.<\/p>\n We used to live in a world where the only way to get information, or to be entertained, or to simply pass the time when you were waiting, or queueing, or on a bus, was reading. Well, we also used to live in a world where the only way to get places was to walk. Then we invented technologies that are very useful in some ways, but we had to take on exercise programs to help us get enough movement in our lives. That\u2019s where we are with reading now.<\/p>\n We just need to accept that and get on with it.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Bookmarks<\/span><\/p>\n Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n So I\u2019ve designed a program. Eight weeks, with three separate tracks. It\u2019s mostly for people like me, who remember that they had a life-sustaining reading habit once but feel that it has somehow fallen away. Over eight weeks, we are working ourselves back to reading half an hour every day, with two or three longer sessions during the week. There are also tracks for people who are really time-limited and just want to be reading 20 minutes a day, and people who feel that they\u2019re basically still reading, but know that they are shying away from the more challenging stuff they want to be tackling.<\/p>\n The response has been extraordinary. After the first week of the program, people are already saying that they\u2019re finding their morning routine goes more quickly now they\u2019re not brain-fogged from scrolling first thing, that reading in stressful times is making them feel calmer and not more anxious as scrolling did, that they can watch a long film without being tempted to look at their phone. They are rediscovering the simple joy of being gripped by a great book after as few as two or three days of working on this together. Fans have put together homemade digital and printable trackers to keep themselves motivated. Teachers are already asking me how to introduce this idea into schools.<\/p>\n It\u2019s really exciting to find out how easy it is to put this right. The program is running right now, and if you\u2019re reading this, you\u2019re not too late to join. Just start from the beginning. All you have to do is put down your phone, pick up a book, and read for 10 minutes. That\u2019s day one.<\/p>\n There is so much joy in books, and it\u2019s all still there waiting for us. All we have to do is take it back from the technology billionaires, one day of reading at a time.<\/p>\n See naomialderman.substack.com for further details<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you feel that it\u2019s harder to read than it used to be? Not harder to read emails, texts and social media posts, of course. We\u2019re reading those all day long. Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? How long is it since you even sat down with a weekend newspaper and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1001,25118,1067],"class_list":{"0":"post-51585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-couchto5k","10":"tag-reading"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}