reading_books‘The web’s full of listicles offering tips – Give up TV or Carry a book with you at all times – but in my experience, such methods don’t work’

Oliver Burkeman

The Guardian

“The conditions in which we read today are not those of 50 or even 30 years ago,” another professional reader, the novelist and critic Tim Parks, wrote in a New York Review of Books essay. “Every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for.” Parks wrote that in June; last month, I finally found time to read it.

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So what does work? Perhaps surprisingly, scheduling regular times for reading. You’d think this might fuel the efficiency mind-set, but in fact, Eberle notes, such ritualistic behaviour helps us “step outside time’s flow” into “soul time”. (You can use space ritualistically, too: read in the same chair, on the same park bench.) You could limit distractions by reading only physical books, or on single-purpose e-readers. “Carry a book with you at all times” can actually work, too – providing you dip in often enough, so that reading becomes the default state from which you temporarily surface to take care of business, before dropping back down. On a really good day, it no longer feels as if you’re “making time to read”, but just reading, and making time for everything else.