Hello, and happy Sunday!
Growing up in pre-democratic Romania, ever since I was very young, I have been taught that books are the answer to any question I might ever have. It was drummed into me as a young pupil that if I ever wanted to achieve anything in life, reading was the way to go about it.
I’m sure I’m not unique, especially among my generation; we were given reading lists for the year, reading lists for the holidays, additional reading lists lest we go through the main list and be left without anything to read. Unsurprisingly, I was never left without anything to read.
When Hermione said her famous “When in doubt, go to the library” I resonated. Throughout my life, books have answered questions I didn’t know I had. They provided me with a three dimensional map to thinking, reasoning and remembering. To this day, I feel anchored and connected with every book I ever read. Even the ones I loathed.
In my adult years and with the rise of the internet, this core belief of mine that reading books is crucial to leading a fulfilled life is what I feel bookstagram and reading apps capitalised on. The fear-of-missing-out mentality that is essential in advertising has transgressed to the literary industry: “It doesn’t matter that you have hundreds of books on your shelves at home. You don’t have this one, and look at its pretty cover. Also, it’s not even out yet, so no one else has it. How about you order it and make sure you get it before anyone else?” Never mind that, as a reader, you don’t read the books you buy in the order of their purchase. If you’re what they call a mood reader, that’s even truer.
For a while, it made me happy to see books being talked about and reading being made cool again. One of the biggest merits of the internet and its biggest drawback as well, is that it can help people form a community, or find their tribe.
For the book lovers, it’s refreshing. But before long, it can be overwhelming. Reading remains one of the most traditional activities in a world where everything is optimised, upgraded and transformed. It still takes the amount of time it takes to read a book, even if you read it on an electronic device or go through an audiobook. Sure, you can speed up the audio, but even that is capped at a maximum speed if you want to truly experience the book and consider it read. Trust me, I’ve tried, and I ended up rewinding because the narrator was talking too fast! The irony.
So when you scroll through bookstagram, or read through the updates on Goodreads or Kindle, you can come across three or four titles in the span of half a minute. Assuming you heed every recommendation that’s already a month’s worth of reading.
Next, we have the yearly reading challenge concept, which we talked about numerous times in the past. It had its heyday and more recently it’s been shamed and shunned, accused of causing anxiety to readers, turning reading into a competition, and even draining the pleasure out of it.
So now people are returning to some sort of intentional reading plan for the year. Focusing on what sparks joy and what feels good.
I know a few people who don’t read books. Fiction or non-fiction. Some say they’re too busy, others say they read other things; magazines, studies, scripts.
The people I know who do read books unanimously harbour a craving to read more and a desire to expand time so that they can fit more books into their life.
I would love to see the look on my book-loving friends’ faces if I turned up one day and asked them: “What do you say we do an experiment? How about you don’t read any book for an entire year?”
A Year Without Reading
It’s a crazy idea, so of course someone has done it!
Daniel Karlin, emeritus professor of English Literature, gave up reading books, newspapers, journals, and most forms of written text for the entire year of 2024 (with the exception of professional manuscript collation work) and wrote about it for The Times Literary Supplement (The TLS)1.
His aim was to explore life without the constant presence of literature, something that had shaped both his career and identity.
I started reading the article and I was still incredulous for the first half of reading it. That someone who has dedicated his life and career to reading would intentionally go without it for a whole year felt like betrayal. What about Zappa’s “Too many books, too little time”?
The motivation felt weak to me, especially for someone past their prime. However, it’s precisely this point in his life that triggered it: retirement. If he’s made his living from reading, retirement means ceasing the activity that was central to his career. Was it labour or love? Habit or chore?
Karlin wanted to see what it would mean to return to a pre-literary self and test whether his lifelong attachment to reading amounted to addiction. But what ‘self’ is that when you’ve been reading all your life?
This made me remember a conversation I had years ago with a close friend who is known to my other friends as the nihilist and eternally pessimistic among us. She challenged my attachment to books and for the first time made me wonder if I could be a different person had I chosen to read different books in my life. The idea of originality both in art and in thinking was still something I believed in at the time. It’s years later when I realised that there is a sort of cannibalism of thought that occurs when we read more of the same that we resonate with. The closest way to describe it is to liken it to how AI-produced text fed back into AI will eventually result in gibberish and hallucination.
Karlin found that he was only a little bored, but didn’t experience discomfort.
I admit I am a little disappointed with myself at not being addicted; spectacular withdrawal symptoms would have lent glamour to the project.
Daniel Karlin, The TLS
He lists three main findings after his year of not reading books, and I am glad someone did this so I don’t have to wonder. Though to be fair, I hadn’t wondered what a year without reading books would be like until I came across this article.
Thinking without books: Karlin writes,
“I found (…) that, in depriving myself of books, I had removed the wall against which I bounced my thoughts. It was much harder than I expected to think deliberately about something, anything.” Without books, he realised how much he relied on other people’s words to generate and shape his own thoughts.
Memory and forgetting: He was surprised to see how little literature he could recall verbatim, even works he taught for decades like Paradise Lost or Hamlet. This echoed the classic concern that writing (and now digital storage) weakens memory. Yet the presence of books still lived in his mind, surfacing in fragments and quotations.
“I became aware of (or anxious about, to be honest) how little of the literature I’d read, particularly poetry, I could remember—that is, remember verbatim.” Although famous lines and fragments resided in his mind, the ability to reconstruct whole passages was gone.
The power of books and how they shape identity: Most poignantly, Karlin reflected on how books influence identity. He remembered the line from Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning2 “the world of books is still the world,” and reconsidered how stories like Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott3 shaped his own adolescence and sense of self, sometimes even against his ethnic origins: “I became, and have remained, ‘English’ by a form of literary-ideological adoption. I must have desired this, yet it seems to me also that I yielded to the desire of the books I read.”
Karlin concludes his article by saying that reading’s power is less about habit or even memory, and more about how books become part of who we are: “Reading isn’t just consumption—it structures memory, defines selfhood, and blurs the boundary between inner life and the external world.”
I wouldn’t want to make a bet with myself, but I can’t imagine I would give up a whole year of learnings, euphoria, excitement, even annoyance at some books that may disappoint. The only condition I would probably accept this challenge on would be if someone could guarantee I get a full year of doing nothing but reading in return!
https://www.the-tls.com/lives/autobiography/a-year-without-reading-essay-daniel-karlin
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is a “novel in verse” that foregrounds a woman’s intellectual and creative journey in Victorian England. Through Aurora’s struggles to be recognized as a poet and her rejection of societal expectations that confined women to supportive, subordinate roles, Browning advocates for personal and artistic autonomy.
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe made a mark in early nineteenth-century literature for its sympathetic depiction of Jewish characters, Rebecca and Isaac of York, against the backdrop of medieval English antisemitism. Scott introduced Victorian readers to the reality of Jewish suffering and, through Rebecca’s intelligence, compassion, and dignity, offered a positive image that challenged prevalent stereotypes.
I would do a year without reading, but only if it's for dedicating it to another goal, involving adventure and physical exhaustion: travelling, doing sports that allow me to know the world in other ways.