We’ve built a library in just a few weeks. Driven by the desire to spend less time on our phones, we’ve researched and bought second-hand paperbacks and now happily read 200 pages daily. The books arrive so quickly it’s as if someone is already on the street with the exact book we’re about to order!
There has been a quiet but unmistakable shift in me recently — a return to reading not as obligation, not as background noise, but as a deliberate, almost physical pleasure.
It began, if I’m honest, with a challenge. Dr Rachael Barr, with the kind of clarity that cuts through modern habits, suggested we “get off the socials and read.” No nuance. No algorithm. Just read. So I did.
And almost immediately, something reawakened. I’ve read most of David Nicholl’s oeuvre, and plenty of Jonathan Coe.
I’ve just read Stephen King’s ‘The Body’. (again). It’s a short, but it carries a sharp density of lived experience — memory, fear, pain, jeopardy, loyalty, the fragile bravado of boys on the edge of adolescence. What struck me was the pacing and technique- the voice that looks back while still inhabiting the moment. It reminded me that storytelling is not about events alone, but about how those events are filtered through consciousness.
From there, I moved into the plot and character blitz of a Ken Follett, next up ‘The Armour of Light’. It’s the third in the Kingsbridge Series which I’ve devoured two weeks at a time – a marathon binge. Expansive, historical, engineered with precision. Where King compresses, Follett builds. Where one leans into interiority, the other orchestrates systems: character, politics, labour, conflict — all interwoven with relentless forward momentum. Reading them back to back is like stepping between two maestros working in different ways, yet both utterly in control of their stories.
And that, I realise, is at the heart of it.
I am reading now not just for story, but to understand how stories are made.
How does a writer earn the turn of a page? How often must something shift — a beat, a revelation, a question — to sustain momentum? How are characters introduced so that they carry weight immediately? What is withheld, and when?
These are not abstract curiosities. They are practical questions. I can feel them feeding directly into my own work — into The Form Photo, into the diaries, into the voices I’m trying to sustain across decades. Reading has become, yet again, a form of apprenticeship. My enthusiasms change; its used to be all about Haruki Murukami, Michel Houellebecq and Henry Miller, via JG Ballard and Nabakov.
But it would be wrong to reduce this return purely to craft. There is also joy. A deep, immersive, almost forgotten joy.
Reading demands something of you that a box set simply does not. It asks for attention, for imagination, for co-creation. The images are not given; they are made. The pace is not imposed; it is negotiated. There is a peculiar satisfaction in that — in meeting the text halfway, in inhabiting it.
Netflix delivers. Reading unfolds.
And in that turning of pages, time behaves differently. An hour can stretch. A scene can linger. A sentence can be reread, turned over, examined. There is space — mental, emotional — that feels increasingly rare elsewhere.
What surprises me most is not that I’ve returned to reading, but how natural it feels. As if this was always the baseline, and everything else — the scrolling, the grazing, the fragmented attention — was the deviation.
So yes, I took the advice. I got off the socials and picked up a book.
But what I’ve found is more than a change in habit. It’s a recalibration.
I’m reading to write better. I’m reading to understand. And, perhaps most importantly, I’m reading because it reminds me what it feels like to be fully engaged — not passively entertained, but actively involved in the making of meaning.
That, I suspect, is why I’ll keep going.
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