Yesterday I looked at the list of books I read this year.
Thin. Very thin. Stripped to the bone. And we are past mid-year.
It was not always like this. I have read a lot in my life. More than a thousand books, if my counting is honest. And the number leaves out everything that comes with my job: the contracts, the academic papers, the research behind the articles and the books I have written myself. Words have always been the water I swim in.
Every year I keep a list of the titles I finish. Novels, professional stuff, comedy. Usually the list goes past ten. Often past twenty or thirty. In the best years, it was almost a book a week.
So I asked myself what changed. Why I am no longer the avid reader I used to be.
Of course, attention span. Of course, the brain rot induced by social media. Of course, commitments. And of course, when you spend your days working with words, the last thing you want at night is more of them.
But there is something else. Three things, actually.
First, I am jaded. Been there, done that, read that. I see the plot twist coming at page thirty. I recognize the revolutionary method as an old idea with a new cover. Very little on a page surprises me anymore. And unfortunately, my standards tend to be quite high: an AI-driven sentence here, some poor research there, and the book loses its appeal.
Second, I am older. I no longer wander through chapters looking for mentors, for masters, for someone to teach me how to live. Life changed, and most days I am the one teaching, lecturing, and mentoring.
Third, sometimes I am the one writing: I have never blogged as much as in the last couple of years. Somewhere along the way the reader became a writer, and nobody told me the two would fight for the same hours.
Still, I believe something deeper is going on. And that thing is that we are living in one of the most peculiar times ever. One year now brings more change than the previous five combined. Tools become obsolete before we finish learning them. Jobs appear and disappear. The world we wake up in is never quite the one we studied for. And, most interestingly, no one has the keys to the future. We just know that tomorrow’s paradigms won’t be yesterday’s.
Books move at a different speed. A novel takes years to be written, months to be printed, and by the time it reaches my nightstand it has become a period piece.
Reading a novel from a few years ago feels like watching a movie from the 1970s. No smartphones. Different jobs. A different society. Characters with time, silence, entire free afternoons. I watch them with tenderness, and with the clear feeling that they are no longer talking about my world.
We are heading into a nowhere zone. A place no map has drawn and no book has described, because it did not exist when the ink dried.
So, when I find the time to read, I go back to the old ones. The Su Wen. The Tao Te Ching. The Bible. The Little Prince. Rumi’s poetry. The ones where the more I read, the more I learn. Each of them survived its own share of nowhere zones, and no smartphone can make them old.
Maybe, one day, I will notice that reading was never a matter of quantity.
It’s what you see in those words.
Bruce Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
For years I collected kicks: a thousand books, read once each. The old ones are teaching me the other art. One book, read ten thousand times.
Maybe I can’t read anymore.
Or maybe I am finally learning how.
