why i barely read any fiction this year

At some point in 2021, I realized something embarrassing: I, a person who deeply loves books and used to read dozens of books a year, could barely read anymore! My attention span is totally shot, completely frayed. I’m still sort of reading Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, and before that, I don’t think I had truly read a novel to completion since the summer.

Maybe it’s the exhaustion of living through our second pandemic year, which was both better (vaccines! reopenings!) and more exhausting (there’s no going back to ‘normal,’ endless risk calculations about every place, event, or gathering, trying to remember the old logistics of commuting and the new logistics of being in an office during a pandemic).

In 2021, it felt harder to focus on any one thing at a time when there were always so many things we were processing and worrying about and navigating at any given moment. The state of the world wasn’t all that great, either —constant climate disasters, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the delta variant — and there was no shortage of opportunities to doomscroll.

I’d start books but lose interest and rarely pick them up again, or take weeks or months to finish a book that should have been a quick read. I’d pick up a book but then find myself re-reading the same page multiple times because I got distracted and didn’t really absorb it the first time. Or I just couldn’t get motivated to pick up a book at all — not when there was an endless internet waiting to be scrolled through!

All of that, I think, made it much harder for me to focus on reading, and escape into the brief break from the real world that a book, especially fiction, usually provides.

newyorkermag

A post shared by The New Yorker (@newyorkermag)

If you’ve read anything good that was fun and easy to get through this year — send me your recs! I’m all ears.

Good things to read

The tragedy of Tom and Shiv, The Atlantic.

Dads are doing less at home again, Bloomberg.

The Egg McMuffin was a radical invention that could never be created today, Washington Post.

Another problem for Latinx, The Atlantic.

How 4 women would redesign their workweeks, Politico.

Energy, and how to get it, The New Yorker.

You can make any day the best day of the year, New York Times.

The best time of year is when it gets dark at 4pm, Mel Magazine.

Good things to cook

Some things I’m cooking this week, on the lighter side post-Thanksgiving: Superhero muffins. Harissa and brown butter salmon. Shrimp fajitas.

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