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A little less than a year ago, I talked to 18 people, writers, critics, editors, and Substackers among them, about how, exactly, they carved out time for reading in their day-to-day lives. Since then, picking up a book certainly hasn’t gotten any less challenging, nor the distractions fewer or less insistent, and yet, final sales tallies from 2025 are hopeful, showing an increase in book sales in the U.S., including in adult fiction and nonfiction. This year, I polled a broader range of readers — editors and publishing-industry people, yes, but also actors, a playwright, and the mayor — on how, exactly, they make the time.
I am always complaining about not having enough time to read, and yet I do nothing else. I have no idea when it gets done or by whom it gets done, but it’s happening all the time. It’s on the edges of life that it happens.
When I was younger, I had a rigid system. For every new book I read for work, I had to go back and reread a book that I admired and was still trying to figure out. I can’t do that anymore.
I am very monogamous: I like to start a book and finish a book, preferably in the same sitting. I read quickly. It’s very appetite driven; I’m nibbling here and there and then get sucked up into one particular book. When I was small, reading was a way to access what felt taboo or forbidden or like adult life. At this stage, the pleasure is more in looking at how each book is a kind of problem and is trying to solve something with its shape and its structure.
Reading is one of the great activities of the nighttime for me. I love those unbroken hours where I can finish novels specifically. My work hours during the pandemic, when we were looking after kids, were from eight at night to four in the morning. Now I tend to read at night in bed.
I spent the first half of my life trying to conceal my reading from my parents and now the second half trying to conceal it from my children. Right now, I’m supposed to be at the bank, but I’m standing outside the bank trying to reread this glorious novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Nobody gives me any peace, and I can’t read it at home, so I have invented this bank errand. I understand that books and reading are meant to be virtuous. But nothing that feels as good can be entirely virtuous, right? So when I say how much I read, it’s not with pride. I should be doing all these other things and I resolutely don’t because I generally read a book a day, whether old or new. I’m not proud of this. Who’s raising my children while I’m doing this? Where are they? I feel like Emma Bovary, leaving my children to their own devices and running off with a novel.
I’m a very regimented person, especially since I’ve gotten sober. I read seven or eight books a month, almost 100 percent of the time. I’ve read all of those trashy memoirs, and I love them, but I limit that for myself at this point. Now I read to become a better writer. While writing a novel the past three years, I read 80 percent novels.
I’m a Kindle woman. I don’t have any books in my house except my own and the galleys people send me. All the bookshelves that I used to have crammed with books are completely empty. Very strange, but that’s just who I am right now. It helps me focus as a writer. The good thing about Kindle is that it definitely has an addictive quality to it — I know that because I take it everywhere. It’s so lightweight. You don’t need natural light. You can have it for days without charging it. I work full time as a writer. Sometimes I work Saturdays with words and screens. Even though the Kindle is another screen, I can make the font so big.
I read the most when I travel. Day to day, I don’t interact with words on a page after 7:30 p.m. because reading is work for me. I am sedentary writing all day so it’s hard for me to read after I’ve been writing. My window for reading is 6 p.m. to 7:30, when I’m exhausted from exercise and it actually feels good to be sitting down.
You have to make a conscious effort. I force myself to do this. Obviously everything else is more fun at this point, dopamine and TikTok and all of that. I had to force myself to start reading more a couple years ago, and it’s very good for me. I keep the percentage in the bottom corner of my Kindle and that pushes me. I’m like, I’m gonna read till 20 percent even if I’m not in the mood. You can get hooked on that. I used to take my hand out of the dryer for gel nails at the salon and I’d be tapping it, but that fucks up your nails. But you can knock your elbow on it and it still changes. I’ve discovered all the tricks.
If I see a Rolls-Royce in the world, I’ll tailgate or I won’t let them in because it’s such an ostentatious display of wealth; I feel like talking publicly about your own reading habits is a slightly less gauche version but still in the category of the person having the Rolls-Royce. To have a life that allows me to read in this way is such a function of the fact that I’ve been lucky and have time and enough money that I’m not panicking constantly.
I try to wake up and walk to this coffee shop near my house and read before I look at my phone, which I leave at home. I do that because I have no self-discipline and it’s easier to have one moment of self-discipline than endless moments of self-discipline. I like being around strangers. It’s comforting and diverting in a way that doesn’t make it impossible to read, but when you want to break from the fictional characters or the world, it’s nice to be able to look up and see a separate circus going on around you.
Right now I’m obsessed with Yiyun Li. I’ve never read anyone like her. I get scared to summarize her books because I don’t want to blaspheme her precision. She’s been through such unbelievable agony and has communicated it with such clarity. I find the act of doing that to be so hopeful and affirmative, even though so much of what she talks about is grotesque in its pain. I looked up the other day to see if she teaches any adult-ed classes at Princeton because I was like, I wonder if I could go and take one. I have Beatlemania for Yiyun Li, which is insane.
