Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The apex of the Pan-American Highway that runs all the way to the southernmost tip of Argentina, and, today, the scene of history’s most elaborate data visualization. Here, where snow wafts around careening caribou and sad-eyed puffins, a horseshoe-shaped conga line of roughly 270,000,000 adult American citizens huddle shoulder to shoulder, ordered by the number of books they read in 2025. At the top of the horseshoe are Omnilegent Octavia, a thickly bespectacled brainiac who read more books that year than anybody else, and Median Mitch, a gangly dudebro in Bose headphones who gamely represents the midpoint of the entire American population. Ask Mitch how many books he read, and he is momentarily confused. “Oh, books,” he exclaims as the word settles into his fuzzy memory. “Right, stupid, sorry. I guess two.”
My mathematical place in line, based on the shoulder widths of the nation’s top readers, is in Portland, Oregon, 2,800 miles south of Octavia. I am the last of the 10,790,540 who read at least 50 books in 2025. We are a comparatively small group, about four percent of Americans, but we are mighty. According to YouGov, the books we have read account for almost half of all books read that year.
Fifty books was an all-time high for me and a heroic recovery from a humiliating decade-long reading slump. But in the dwindling days of 2025, I nevertheless found my ability to cogently discuss the books I read lagged behind my numeric proficiency. If you asked me about today’s book, I could provide a competent synopsis, but reference something I read a book or two ago, and I was in danger of stammeringly revealing a lack of pertinent memories. The experience of silently rifling through novels felt vanishingly ephemeral. It was too easy to swat pages aside without fully processing themes and symbols. Who cared? Nobody was going to know the difference anyway.
So, in January 2026, I resolved to start writing book reviews. The epoch of BookTok and Goodreads was blooming all around me, and that began to feel like a massive peer support system. You couldn’t set foot on a social media platform without stumbling over a book influencer. I had no desire to join their ranks; I thought I was in it exclusively to get more out of my isolating hobby. Nevertheless, the legion of online everymen extolling the virtues of Stoner and East of Eden made me feel considerably less self-conscious about scribbling a thematic summary of George Eliot’s Romola. It seemed like everyone past the age of Judy Blume’s target reader had already been doing this for years, and the vast majority of online reader reviews were concise snapshots. Surely I could commit to this project with no fear that it would overwhelm my existing obligations. Right? Wrong. What I hadn’t considered was that I was temperamentally incapable of concise encapsulations.
Alas, I was not designed for hastily jotted single paragraph thematic summaries. Nor could I restrain myself, as so many did so skillfully on BookTok, to pithy one-minute videos enumerating the salient characteristics of this week’s bibliographic offering. No, I would settle down in the living room at 7pm to think through a quickie outline on Terrence McNally’s Golden Age, and at dawn my hindquarters would still be embedded in that La-Z-Boy, fingers furiously hammering a form-defying, 3,500-word, quadruple-layer narrative demonstrating existential parallels between the untimely demise of opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, the fruitless longevity of his mentor Gioachino Rossini, the Covid death of McNally himself, and my own harrowing visit to the epicenter of the pandemic with my elderly father days before lockdown.
I wasn’t a newbie. I had logged substantial writing hours from college on as a writer of vaguely absurdist plays, improv-fueled comic sketches, school newspaper journalism and movie reviews, widely distributed album reviews, and standardized test English and Reading passages. But every time I tried to scale back my Goodreads ambitions, I would become unexpectedly transfixed by another freakishly cobbled essay structure tightly coiled around a central thesis.
In my modest earliest efforts, I began to sense an involuntarily emerging persona straining gently against its own embarrassment at the inauspicious online platforms it inhabited. It had a wry sense of humor that sometimes expanded into a brazen joke impulse with little regard for general accessibility. “Nobody’s going to find this funny but me,” it seemed to say. “But I’m going to say it anyway.” It had the same devil-may-care attitude about its pretentious vocabulary. “Oh, you don’t understand this word? I just learned it, too. Are there no dictionaries?”
The voice was forever veering into allusive tangents. The further afield, the better. It couldn’t mention Ian McEwan without rambling on about Oscar Wilde, Tom Stoppard, and A.S. Byatt. It managed to spoon dollops of essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan into its explication of a little-known historical play by Henrik Ibsen. In a discussion of classical capstone Johannes Brahms, it prattled on about 1980s Christian schlock purveyor Russ Taff.
At first, it timidly confessed to “undergrad romantic blunders” when a college memory felt inseparable from a literary work. Then it started tossing adolescent feelings about my mother’s curfew policies into an impressionistic salad of late-night memories. Eventually, it wanted to blab about my most deeply regretted dating failures in the context of an excruciating rash that wouldn’t go away. Sometimes these stories were so revealing that family members who’d involuntarily become characters on the world wide web started to feel uncomfortable with my disclosures.
Most surprisingly of all, it persistently articulated a coherent moral worldview centered on semi-religious, semi-secular compassion. I was shocked at how decisively it delineated a previously unexamined boundary between morality in art and morality in life. “Fiction has to be distinct, a space where imagination issues temporary pardons at the expense of real-world rage.” The voice insisted on repeated visitations of deeply conflicted and closely held feelings about my long-gone evangelical upbringing and all-too-current cost-benefit analyses of religious belief.
Over time, the book reviews ceased to be book reviews. They were 3,000-word comp-lit dissections of titles so far-flung in genre I’d never be able to find readers with interest in both. They were thoughtfully structured personal reflections that simultaneously rummaged through two contrasting writers’ lifetime outputs. Every book raised its hand effusively with a distinct and intriguing gimmick. I couldn’t write about them all; I didn’t have time. I was developing a stockpile of unrealized ideas that loomed over me as I tried to sleep.
At those moments, reading seemed to outpace writing to the extent that I was convinced I’d never catch up on my writing backlog. But then writing would come roaring back to the forefront so furiously that I thought I’d never be able to make good on my reading commitments. I didn’t always know why I was putting so much effort into it. My readership expanded over time, and eventually a few dozen followers began trickling onto the various publishing platforms that housed my work, including an increasingly elaborate website of my own. Writing began to feel like a passionate affair that threatened my more convenient marriage to software development. Why was I working so hard at it?
It might be instructive to cast a Freudian gaze hindward. Let me “tell you about my mother.”
I have not always been such a dedicated reader. My relationship with books has shifted mercurially throughout my life. As a Montessori kid, my formative education was shaped by the early 20th-century pedagogy of an Italian physician who was convinced my gelatinous six-year-old frontal cortex was better qualified to construct a comprehensive curriculum than the middle-aged professional educators hovering around me. “The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist,” wrote Maria Montessori in The Secret of Childhood. The lady shoved all her chips upon the self-directive capacities of children with the same mystical confidence Adam Smith bestowed upon the Almighty Market. Some of my classmates parlayed our carrot-shaving lessons into later academic brilliance, but I spent my classroom time scribbling “Drama Jokes” onto line ruled paper and crafting science fiction narratives that differed from Star Wars mostly in that the lightsabers were not called lightsabers. To my credit, however, I was a fairly early adopter with regard to books. I vividly recall my first encounter with a consonant digraph. My kindergarten instructor patiently taught me how to pronounce the word “the” before hurriedly re-donning her cloak of invisibility. I also remember being so proud of the density of my inaugural novel, The Hobbit, that I irritated surrounding adults with performative exclamations of enthusiasm every time Gandalf puffed a smoke ring.
That may have been my most prestigious childhood reading selection, however. My elder brother once asked my English major mother why she kept investing in Jules Verne and Charles Dickens volumes that we studiously tossed aside in favor of The Hardy Boys, The Great Brain, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle. “There was a time when I harbored the illusion my children might read the classics,” she replied with pointed irony.
In high school, my Montessori entitlement prompted me to tolerate substandard grades in Math and Science even as I steadily racked up A’s on an ineluctable path to AP College English. As an enthusiastic theater kid, my foremost binge was dramatic literature, but I also greedily gobbled assigned reads from The Once and Future King to The Grapes of Wrath. My strongest memory from my high school reading career is my unrestrained astonishment at the daredevil narrative shifts, dense thematic layering, and brazenly heightened realism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I had never experienced the likes of its sagaciously lyrical innovation.
I began my adult life reading with modest avidity, but those habits atrophied as the social media era advanced. During my twenties, I think the shelves that contained plays overbrimmed faster than the shelves that contained novels, but it wasn’t until my career swerved into database design that I began compiling statistics. Those records suggest that book counts in my twenties and thirties were consistently in the upper percentiles of American readers. But those numbers dropped precipitously during my forties as I increasingly succumbed to the stultifying allure of ubiquitous pixelated screens. Between 2010 and 2022, I mustered only about four books per year. In an interview at the Strand Bookstore in New York City, actor Ethan Hawke cast my slump as a hallmark of our times:
“I’ve been watching my own reading diminish, and I hear about how it’s really happening everywhere. I hate the fact that it’s happening in me, too. I’ve been playing a bookstore owner, and it’s been bringing back in me a desire to have books be really a part of my life.” Actor Ethan Hawke
Gradually, as I became aware of the trend, nagging concern mounted into alarm. I started to wonder whether I had permanently surrendered the attention span that a 400-page book demands. I tried to tell myself that movies, plays, and a reputed “golden age of television” were churning the same cognitive and artistic machinery that literature had once propelled. But the slow erosion of my written and verbal capacities told a different story. Somewhere around my 50th birthday, I decided it was now or never. I had to start penciling in time for sustained reading. Hawke’s frequent collaborator, the director Richard Linklater, compellingly distills the philosophy I adopted:
“I was never a hang-out-in-the-coffee-shop-with-my-friends guy. … Why would I hang out with you for two hours when I could go read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche? All the greatest minds that ever lived are available to me. I want to hang out with them. … I want to waste my time—what others consider wasting my time—I want to lay around and be bored for an afternoon. Which means reading, listening to music, writing. But that’s where your ideas come from: boredom. What looks like boredom to other people. … You almost have to schedule that in for yourself.” Filmmaker Richard Linklater
It wasn’t easy at first. Trying to read 20 pages in a sitting felt like trying to bench press Belgium. But I kept feeding my brain literary protein even when it howled for TikTok videos. Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Forster. Ishiguro as a tidy palate cleanser. Along came 2025, and there I was in figurative Portland, shoulder to shoulder with the nation’s most voracious readers, peering up ambitiously at Omnilegent Octavia.
As my first year as a book blogger entered its final quarter, swollen book counts were even less the point than they were before the writing threatened to take over every waking moment of my gradually less inconspicuous existence. What then is the point? I am currently working on compiling the year’s output as an essay collection with “diary” entries that contextualize each hybrid experiment. That is my best effort to figure out exactly what the point is. I won’t deny I found a yawning appetite for feedback lurking just beneath the surface of my insistence that I was in it for personal growth. If I was honest, I wanted someone to read these things. But who cared what I thought about the classics or contemporary literary fiction? I wasn’t going to convince anyone that I sat behind New Yorker essayist Elif Batuman at the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, swapping chummy Tolstoy insights and commiserating over Ivan’s beastly unworthiness. I wasn’t an academic, I was a ham actor who’d long ago hung up his clown shoes. Winning readers meant standing out, and the only way I could think to do that was by playing to the eccentric amalgamation of writerly strengths exhibited by that obstinately inescapable voice. It was time to push in my chips with the confidence of Maria Montessori and Adam Smith. All in on red. Let’s see where the voice wants to go this week.
