Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.My job as a book critic used to elicit envy at cocktail parties, with people fantasising about a life spent reading. Now it’s more likely to trigger sheepish admissions from partygoers about not reading as much as they’d like to — as if I’m going to spring a pop quiz on Moby-Dick. Long gone are the days when James Joyce’s Ulysses was a man-magnet, as the Irish novelist Anne Enright reminisced to me on a panel marking the book’s centenary in 2022. My own college bookshelf featured a copy of David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page Infinite Jest with similar aims. Today, even literature students don’t read long books any more. The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, who teaches at universities in both the US and UK, recently lamented this decline. Forty years ago “you could say to a student, ‘This week it’s Dickens. Please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’,” he told BBC Radio 4. “Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.” A recent survey by the charity the Reading Agency showed that only half of adults in the UK read regularly for pleasure, down from 58 per cent in 2015. More troubling still, 35 per cent are lapsed readers who used to enjoy the hobby. My cocktail-party confessors — among them novelists — tell me they now find themselves scrolling in bed rather than reading. And who can blame them? Social media is designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation in a way that makes it hard for the technology of the page to compete.Just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds — while deep reading offers additional cognitive rewardsAccording to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World, while our brains are primed for language acquisition, they are not innately programmed to read; reading is a learnt skill. But brain plasticity works both ways: use it or lose it, and we are increasingly choosing to lose it. The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot”— meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.The easy dopamine hit of social media can make reading feel more effortful by comparison. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher wellbeing and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, focus, connection and creativity. While just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection. Ella Berthoud, a bibliotherapist offering personalised book “prescriptions” and the co-author with Susan Elderkin of The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies, says clients are increasingly seeking guidance on how to read more. To build up a reading habit, she recommends trying audiobooks, creating a reading nook for print books and keeping a reading journal, as note-taking helps ground what you’ve read in memory. For those looking to kill two new year’s resolutions with one stone, Berthoud demonstrates the impressively co-ordinated feat of Hula-Hooping while reading.If your reading muscle has atrophied, rather than delving straight into an annotated Ulysses, it may be easier to start small with short stories or novellas, Berthoud says. Recent bite-sized favourites include the Storybook collection from New Directions — designed to be read in one sitting — and books from Peirene, an indie publisher specialised in novellas in translation.While the fiction market is buoyed by genres such as crime, fantasy and romance that are popular on BookTok (the influential reading community within TikTok), non-fiction sales are down markedly year-on-year. The received wisdom is that non-fiction is more skimmable, leading to the emergence of apps such as Blinkist, Headway and StoryShots, which offer book summaries suspected to be largely AI-generated. But even putting the copyright and accuracy issues of AI aside, reading is not just about efficiency. Good non-fiction offers not just information but a conversation: following an author’s thought process effectively trains our monkey minds to think.My favourite non-fiction book this year — and an excellent antidote to brain rot — is Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. Covering 33 books with a bibliography of further suggested reading, it’s both a way to exercise deep reading and a portal for re-engaging with some of the greatest works in history. Maria Popova, an author and essayist who started the literary website The Marginalian, once described literature as “the original internet”, with every reference and footnote “a hyperlink to another text”. The advantage is that you can get lost in this analogue internet without viral content jumping up and down screaming for your attention. Even if the TikTok ban goes ahead in the US, other platforms will pop up to replace it. So in 2025, why not replace the phone on your bedside table with a book? Just an hour a day clawed back from screen time adds up to about a book a week, placing you among an elite top one per cent of readers. Melville (and a Hula-Hoop) are optional.Mia Levitin is a critic and the author of ‘The Future of Seduction’Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
