No one’s reading for fun, apparently. Here’s a reading list to fix that.
Researchers recently found that “reading for fun in the US has fallen by 40%,” which sucks. The study shows “a sustained, steady decline” over about twenty years, which I agree with the scientists is “deeply concerning.”
If you’re a Lit Hub regular, you’re probably not in danger of drifting permanently away from reading. But we all know how hard it is to claw free space to read when there are so many other distractions. Lord knows I find myself pulled away from a book by my phone more often than I’d like.
So here are some books to consider replacing a few of the more engrossing habits that are vying perennially for our attention.
Instead of binge watching a TV show, read a short story collection. After all, what is a book of short fiction but a series of connected episodes? I really dug Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, which just came out. Each story is a perfect little world—I particularly loved the story about someone who ended up being gifted a tail. There’s humor, insight, and a ton of catchy and inventive premises here.
Or if you want to get scared, Kay Chronister’s Thin Places is out next month and is spook-tacular. There’s a creepy kids story in there that really got me, and is scarier than anything those Stranger Things kids got into, if you ask me.
Or get a book of essays! Rax King’s Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong is bold and smart and goddamn funny. You won’t miss the TV, I swear.
Instead of getting stuck in the short video hell of TikTok, read some very short fiction, like Luke O’Neil’s collection We Had It Coming. This one’s out soon, and it’s excellent. Most of these stories are a page or two, but O’Neil packs a lot into a little space. The stories are hilarious, insightful, devastating—there’s something for every reader who is stuck in the spin cycle of modern life. Wouldn’t expect anything less from the writer behind Welcome to Hell World.
Instead of rewatching The Office for the millionth time, pick up Ed Park’s workplace comedy Personal Days. One of my favorite funny books, Personal Days is a brilliant office novel that is full of jokes and amazing formal choices. Keep the TV off, this will scratch the same itch of gossiping about weird and wacky coworkers.
Instead of scrolling Twitter, read something about a cranky, divorced loser, like The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, and translated by Canaan Morse. Another favorite comic novel of mine, this one follows a guy in Beijing who installs custom, old school sound systems for rich people. He hates his clients and he hates himself, and is constantly complaining—the perfect replacement for Twitter.
Instead of scrolling Reddits like “r/todayilearned,” read a history book that will upend what you thought you knew, like Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s The Bright Ages, which reevaluates what we know as the Dark Ages. It’s a fascinating survey of a thousand years of history that manages to be both wide-ranging and very focused. Everything from Vikings, the Black Death, and Charlemagne are reconsidered. And each chapter dives into a different topic, making it a good one to pick up and put down.
Instead of scrolling Wikipedia, read a few of Oxford’s Very Short Introductions. Wikipedia is technically reading, yes, but I think part of the goal here is to ditch the screens. The premise of The Very Short Introductions series is almost impossibly expansive: release one-off books about every subject, inclusively. It looks like at press time there are nearly 800 of them, from Abolitionism to Zola, Émile. I read a fistful of Introductions before a trip to Italy last year—Renaissance Art by Geraldine A. Johnson, Modern Italy by Anna Cento Bull, and Dante by Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, to name a few. They were all super accessible and written by impressive experts. One thing I didn’t realize before reading this series is that each author is given a lot of latitude to structure the book as they’d like, so the books are a lot more formally interesting than a rigid textbook. If you ever thought “What’s the deal with light?” or “What was the Cold War again?” or “Insects?!” this is the series to get into.
Instead of going too deep on someone’s Instagram profile, read a collection that gives you a wide-ranging view on a remarkable life, like This Unruly Witness, about the poet and activist June Jordan. I got an advanced copy of this book and have been really fascinated by its blend of interviews, essays, short memories, letters and more, all about June Jordan. It’s expansive and wonderful.
Instead of starting a reality show with hundreds of episodes and endless characters and plot lines, start a long book series. There are dozens of books in Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin books, and as a guy who just got a pair of “functional sneakers,” I am obligated to recommend this series. Start at the top with Master and Commander and go from there. And if you don’t believe me about how fun these books are, check out Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s excellent reading of the series as a “domestic fantasy about a codependent life partnership.”
Or pick up Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. Yes, they’re YA, but with Le Guin there’s always a depth of thinking and sentence level beauty to hook even the snobbiest adult. And the series’s capstone, Tehanu, is worth sticking around for. It’s a fascinating feminist re-evaluation of the world Le Guin built in the previous books, and it makes for slower and more thoughtful ending than you tend to find in this kind of fantasy.
Instead of scrolling Instagram memes, read something visually and verbally enticing, like Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage, by Pierre La Police, and translated by Luke Burns. I love this absurdist, sort-of-mystery comic about paranormal investigators who are trying to figure out what the hell is going on with the mollusks, UFOs, and weird weather. The whole this is very slapstick and irreverent, and the story is advanced almost exclusively by wacky deus ex machinas. But it’s full of memorable turns of phrase and vivid, silly illustrations—it’s a very funny book, and will handily one-up any meme account.
Or if you want something with more story, that’s also funny, thoughtful, and visually inventive, read Mattie Lubchansky’s Simplicity about an academic who gets pulled into a weird, upstate cult. The writing is sharp and thoughtful, and the illustrations are excellent: Lubchansky’s got a confident and expressive line that sells emotion on the page. It makes for a terrifying, funny, and nuanced book—it’s a stunner! Better than scrolling by an upstate-cult-compound mile.
Or pick up the new translation of Mafalda by Quino, and translated by Frank Wynne. This is a legendary Argentine cartoon, appearing in English for the first time—I’ve been told it’s basically the Peanuts of Latin America. The strips are great: funny, smart, and more political than you might think. And if you like Instagram accounts that introduce you to different cultures, this is a great way to get a bit of culture you might not have heard about before.
So get reading, folks! Let’s see if we can get those reading-for-fun numbers up, give America something to be proud of for once these days.
How about we check back in another 20 years or so and see how we did?
