I feel like it’s a contemporary social menace: That sense of panic when you realise that your buddy is on chapter twelve and you’re still struggling to get past the prologue. Buddy reads are exciting because of that mutual enthusiasm; they’re also accountable! But what happens if one person wants to slow down or go […]

Here’s the rereader’s conundrum: You pick up a book published three years ago, and you don’t know where the hell it went. You recall broad strokes of the story, maybe a single great sentence, or shape of ending, but that middle part are foggy. Why does this occur? Memory decays, and it is most destructive […]

This was prepared for Book Club Night. If you’re not ready for it, your book club night is going to stink. It will be you and a group of friends talking through one character’s trouble. Everyone else will have read the entire thing but you are only up to page forty. Panic sets in. What […]

Starting a reading streak isn’t just an act of intellectual ambition. It’s a form of behavioral engineering. The goal is to trick yourself into thinking that cracking open a book means “being a reader” instead of “fulfilling an obligation.” And that’s why you frequently begin another novel with great determination and then see it gathering […]