I don’t read that much these days. I am lucky now if I read one novel a month. I am ashamed to admit that my current book has been open for six weeks. This isn’t me. I am a lifelong devoted reader: the kid who hauled home a bicycle basket full of books from the public library every Saturday, and the teenager who found solace in reading myself into other lives.
I am grateful to the authors who transported me. Their stories accompanied me through deep loneliness. Seeing life through someone else’s eyes allowed for a kind of mind sync between my mind and the writer’s mind. Even if the writer lived in another century or across the world, there was a consciousness making me feel, think, and see beyond my own. To this day, each time I open up a novel and read the first few paragraphs, I feel the thrill of becoming situated elsewhere through another person’s perceptions and sensitivities.
What has happened to me and to so many others? Here’s the truth of it. Instead of reading, I am watching a movie every night with my spouse. I am propped up on pillows with my gaze latched onto a screen. This watching requires almost nothing of me. I slide easily into the spectacle and get carried forward, streaming along, jostled here and there wherever the story takes me. Moreover, I look forward to it every night. The two of us love doing this together. Our abandoned books are secondary, separate adventures.
Books have piled up on my nightstand, bookshelves, and the floor of my office, calling out to the old me. When I do finally pick up one of them, reading startles me into feeling participatory, active, far more co-creative than those movies. My hand turning the pages is a visceral pleasure. I love the feeling of the paper against my fingers and the satisfaction of progress as pages pile up on the left side and dwindle on the right. Putting myself into the characters, visualizing their surroundings and smelling their odors, comes from my interior, my own experience, along with the author’s.
In this regard, novels are intimate. There’s no sense of separation. Instead, the worlds that I am so readily receiving from the directors, actors, screenwriters, music and set designers, as well as those who work the cameras and special effects, are the culmination of many visions coming together and not nearly so personal.
The title of Maryanne Wolf’s passionate book calls out to me directly through a plea: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. The whole idea of a reading brain that gets developed when we are young has stayed with me, fruitfully, but there is a sentence Wolf wrote ten pages from the end of her book that encapsulates what I am saying here. “My hope for my children and my children’s children and yours is that they… will know where to find the many forms of joy that reside in the secret hiding places in the reading life and the sanctuary it gives to each of us who seeks it.”
Working on this post, facing what has become of me through digital seductions, I have cancelled my only subscription to a streaming service. Notices keep coming in to get me back into it. With three weeks to go before the service ends, I am feeling relieved that soon I will be able to get back to myself. In the meantime, I probably will watch a movie every night.
Copyright: Wendy Lustbader, 2026
