The dopamine hit from being on your smartphone all the time makes reading a book seem more laborious – but it’s worth the extra effort
My name is LEVITIN
My work as a book critic used to be the envy of cocktail parties, with people fantasizing about a lifetime spent reading. Now it’s more common to elicit embarrassing confessions from attendees about not reading as much as they’d like—as if I were giving them a surprise test on “Moby-Dick.”
The days when James Joyce’s Ulysses was a magnet for men are long gone, as the Irish writer Anne Enright reminded me at a panel to mark the book’s 100th anniversary in 2022. For similar reasons, my university library contained a 1,000-page copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Today, even literature students no longer read long books. The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, who teaches at universities in both the US and the UK, recently lamented this decline in readership. He told BBC Radio 4 that, 40 years ago, “you might say to students: ‘This week is Dickens. Please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.’ Now, instead of three novels in one week, many students barely finish one novel in three weeks.”
A recent survey by the charity Reading Agency found that only half of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58 per cent in 2015. Even more worrying, 35 per cent are readers who once enjoyed the hobby. Those who confess at cocktail parties – novelists among them – tell me that they now find themselves scrolling on their phones in bed instead of reading. And who can blame them? Social media is designed to capture our attention with stimulation and approval, in a way that the technology of the book page has a hard time competing with.
According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World,” while our brains are wired to acquire language, they are not naturally programmed to read; reading is a learned skill. But brain plasticity works both ways: use it or lose it, and we are increasingly choosing to lose it. The 2024 word of the year from Oxford University Press was “brain rot” — meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual degradation from its overconsumption. First recorded as a term in Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” in 1854, its surge in usage this year has been attributed (ironically) to its mention in TikTok videos.
The mild dopamine boost from social media can make reading seem like a chore by comparison. But it’s worth the effort: Regular readers report greater well-being 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 benefits, such as critical thinking, empathy, and self-reflection.
Ella Berthoud, a bibliophile who offers personalized book “prescriptions” and co-author with Susan Elderkin of “The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies,” says clients are increasingly asking for guidance on how to read more. To build a reading habit, she recommends trying audiobooks, creating a reading nook for physical books, and keeping a reading journal, as taking notes helps reinforce memory. For those looking to combine two new goals this year, Berthoud demonstrates the impressive power of the Hula-Hoop while reading.
If your reading muscles have atrophied, instead of diving straight into, say, Ulysses and taking notes, it might be easier to start with short stories or novellas, Berthoud says. Her favorites for short reads include the “Storybook” collection from New Directions — designed to be read in a single sitting — and books from Peirene Press, an independent publisher specializing in novellas.
While the fiction market benefits from genres like crime, fantasy, and romance, which are popular on BookTok (TikTok’s influential reading community), nonfiction book sales have fallen significantly year-on-year. The prevailing belief is that nonfiction is easier to scan, leading to the emergence of apps like Blinkist, Headway, and StoryShots, which offer book summaries that are allegedly largely generated by artificial intelligence. But even leaving aside the issues of copyright and AI accuracy, reading is not just about efficiency. Good nonfiction offers not only information, but also a conversation: following an author’s thought process trains our minds to think.
My favorite nonfiction book this year—and a great antidote to brain degradation—is “Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century” by Edwin Frank. Covering 33 books with a bibliography of suggested further reading, it’s a way to practice deep reading and a gateway to reconnect with some of history’s greatest works. Maria Popova, the author and essayist who founded the literary site The Marginalian, once described literature as “the original internet,” where every reference and note is “a hyperlink to another text.” The advantage is that you can get lost in this analog internet without the viral content screaming for your attention.
Even if TikTok is banned in the US, other platforms will emerge to replace it. So in 2025, why not replace your phone on your nightstand with a book? Just one hour a day of screen time adds up to about a book a week, putting you among the high percentage of readers. (The New York Times)
