The Good Reader

There are still readers, real ones, endangered and elusive as those peculiar souls who savor airline food. More intriguingly, there are still good readers, the kind who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, even when a New Yorker piece from last April lingers in their browser tabs like a literary ghost. This summer, our hero, let’s call him the Good Reader, resolved to do what he had not done in a decade: he would read. Not skim, not scroll, not glance, but read, diving into long, fat, slow books with index pages and forewords by translators who once lived in Peru. The Good Reader, age 42, a man of many tote bags and even more abandoned reading lists, was no stranger to such ambitions. In 2016, he declared a James Baldwin spring. In 2018, it was the Ali Smith autumn. The Hilary Mantel winter fell apart somewhere around page 47. And the summer he planned to finally read Proust? That turned into a Netflix rewatch of The Crown.

The year 2025 felt different, or so he told himself it had to be. The world had hit cognitive rock bottom, with attention spans shorter than Twitter’s new 18-character limit. Even the best book of the year, a 28-page novella woven from speech transcripts and DALL·E prompts, was hailed as “brilliantly demanding” by The Guardian and “possibly real” by Electric Literature. So, the Good Reader made a plan, as all noble quests begin, with logistics. For location, he dreamed of a cabin in the woods or a terrace in Lisbon but settled, as all men must, for an Airbnb guest bedroom in Cannon Beach, Oregon. His devices included a Kindle Paperwhite for night, an iPad for annotations, and a notebook for analog dignity.

His book stack, which he dubbed his ReadStack™, comprised eleven titles, including Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, which he pretended not to judge by its title; Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which he bought after reading three glowing blurbs and one blistering Substack takedown; and the latest Booker darling narrated by a sentient climate model named Eos. He even checked Bill Gates’ annual summer reading list, just in case there was a surprisingly readable economics book with a pastel cover and a pun for a title. He posted this stack on Instagram, with filters, under #Bookstagram and #SummerOfSubstance, determined to break the curse of Good Intentions and become the Last Reader Standing.

The Thousand Tiny Defeats

It began on Day One, with the Good Reader brewing a French press, arranging his tools (Kindle to the left, hardcover to the right, notebook center, a Reynolds pen aligned like a weapon of war), and sitting with the posture of a man preparing to meet his gods. He opened the first book, an intergenerational novel about sugarcane farmers and quantum physics, read the first paragraph twice (lyrical, dense, possibly genius), and then a notification interrupted. It was nothing, just a Substack from a critic he admired, reviewing a book he hadn’t read, mentioning three others he now wanted to. He clicked, then clicked again, opening Amazon in another tab, detouring to Twitter (X), then Goodreads, then a hate-scroll, and twenty-six minutes later, he had read only 41 words. This was defeat number one. By Day Three, his defeats multiplied like tribbles: he highlighted a sentence in his Kindle but couldn’t resist asking ChatGPT, “What does this sentence mean in simple terms?”; he searched a character’s name and spent forty minutes reading about Hungarian naming conventions; the lawnmower roared just as the book got good; his boss messaged, “Quick thing when you have a sec?”; a group chat sent 47 unread messages debating whether the new Sapiens for Teens was any good; and his nephew emailed, a rare note he promised to read later, then forgot.

He tried audiobooks while walking, but nearly got hit by a delivery drone, his focus as fleeting as the steps he took. On Day Six, he read the back cover of a novel six times and wept quietly, not for the book, but for himself. He remembered Calvino’s Good Intentions, that charming 1959 essay about a man who went on holiday to read and returned with nothing but sunburn and regret. The Good Reader wasn’t just Calvino’s reader; he was the evolved, optimized, premium, late-capitalist, cloud-synced, neuro-fractured edition, Calvino 2.0. He was a man not merely undone by leisure, but obliterated by the relentless, hydra-headed swarm of content that defined his era.

The Mind: A Machine That Forgets to Sit Still

The Good Reader had not always been like this, or so he swore. There was a time he could read for hours, devouring novels thick enough to stun a burglar, sentences that began in one season and ended in another. He remembered reading The Brothers Karamazov on a train in India, with goats, a memory that had to mean something. But now, in the Summer of 2025, he couldn’t tell if his brain was a hyperactive toddler or a burnt-out server farm. Between the eighth browser tab and the ninth unread newsletter, he realized his brain was no longer a cathedral but an airport food court, with everyone yelling. The neuroscientists had names for this: attention residue, dopamine fatigue, task-switching costs. He had simpler ones: the blip, the ping, the doomscroll, the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, the TikTok about focus that lasted 29 minutes.

He was leaking cognition, and worst of all, he knew. He wasn’t dumb; he had read Birkerts, watched the first four minutes of Cal Newport on YouTube, and half-read five books about why he couldn’t read books. He was meta-aware, hyper-aware, a Borges story about a reader who knows he cannot read. His brain was a machine that once roamed fields and now twitched in cages, his thoughts arriving chopped, scattered, in TikTok-length fragments. Sometimes he thought, “I should read,” but forgot what, or why, or how. Reading, real reading, had become resistance, like baking bread in wartime, remembering your own phone number, or saying no to the algorithm. And he was losing the war.

The Pile Unread

When September comes, as it always will, it will arrive like a librarian clearing her throat, the summer slipping quietly out the back door, the light shifting just enough to make the Good Reader feel the loss. The Kindle, untouched and unbothered, will have updated itself three times while turned off, and the stack of books on the nightstand, once proud, soon quietly bitter, will grow a thin layer of dust and something deeper: a kind of existential judgment. The Good Reader will have read the forewords, the acknowledgements, the reviews of books he won’t read, a toxic Twitter thread that will swallow a debut author whole, and, on Threads, someone else’s quote from the very novel he meant to begin, which he’ll highlight, not in the book, but in a digital note titled “Must return to this. Later.” He will, in short, not have read.

Yet in the pile of the unread, there will be something that still hums: hope, shaped like a battered paperback, glowing faintly from a half-charged e-ink screen, or tucked between pages like a receipt from a summer that could still be salvaged. The Good Reader, for all his tiny, ridiculous defeats, will not stop wanting to read, and in the year 2025, that desire alone may nearly qualify as sainthood. When asked, perhaps on a quiet Sunday, over good coffee, with just the right measure of guilt, he will smile and say, “Reading? Of course. I just finished something wonderful last week,” though he will not have. “Which book? Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue,” he will add, though it won’t be. But he means it.

He doesn’t read Tolstoy, but he reads his nephew’s email. Twice. And that, in a way, is literature.

cross-posted to LinkedIn.