The Reading Year

A world of distraction

As lifelong readers, up until now we have held a benign view of reading for pleasure. That people choose whether to read or not, and that either choice was fine. Reading was integral to our lives, but we weren't about to go around exhorting others to do it. We still aren't. However, there is something about our world today that makes us view the practice of reading with a bit more urgency.

Unlike the idealistic early days of the internet, our digital lives today are starting to seem like something out of a dystopian novel, with our attention cornered and commodified by addictive technologies including algorithm-driven short-form video and the insidious infinite scroll. We are hyper-stimulated and our attention spans are clearly plummeting. This is not restricted to any age group, it runs across all generations, and even those of us who grew up largely ‘analog’ find the pull of our devices hard to resist. None of this is good for our cognitive health. And while we seem to have an instinctive awareness of this, many of us struggle to get free, or to find balance, in our constant consumption.

What reading can do

We believe that reading deeply and for pleasure can have a significant positive impact. Reading can help retrain the brain to sustain focus and rebuild cognitive depth. It fuels our imagination and creativity. It is how we make better sense of the world around us. We gain valuable perspective when we step briefly out of our own lives and into someone else's, and it matters not a bit that the “someone else” is entirely fictional; in fact, fictional characters can have a more profound effect on us sometimes than real people.

And the simple fact is that reading can be loads of fun. The books we come to love can be a source of lasting joy and comfort in our lives.

What we mean by reading deeply

After all, text is everywhere. We all seem to be reading all the time, whether it is the captions on social media, our daily emails, text messages, blog posts or news articles. But often, our engagement with this kind of digital text is shallow. We scan the words to quickly obtain information, and when we have it, we move on.

Deep reading is different. It requires us to slow down, pay close attention, respond to the language and the ideas presented to us. Exercising our reading muscle, and seeing what it unlocks in our minds, is an attempt well worth making.

What we're doing about it

The Reading Year will run interventions that make it easier for individuals to develop, or regain, a habit of reading.

Our initial focus is on full-time college students for whom reading for pleasure is often an early casualty.

If they want to make books a bigger part of their lives, but don't know where to start, can't justify spending on books that might not suit them, or have no one to recommend books to them, we can help by removing these obstacles for at least a year. The books are free, so they needn't worry about the cost of a bad choice. They are chosen with care by a friendly neighbourhood bookshop. And we ask nothing beyond some light-touch feedback. All they need to bring is their curiosity and intent.