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Do not feel bad if you read fewer books this year than any years. It is not only because we have time that we read. We read as people participating in culture, and culture is people together talking and making things.
It seems to follow: if there is less of that, there is less reading. There is less writing. There is less of a sense of there being a communal space in which these things get much of their meaning, and so it becomes harder to do it.
It becomes harder to do it because the "why" of doing it becomes more obscure.
There is something very social about reading: we know that after reading a book we will go into the world slightly new. We will bring things to other people that are new, or be slightly different from how we were before. That disappears when there is no world to go into anymore.
There is an intensely inward-turning aspect to reading of course, but there is this other thing as well. That's all I wanted to say.
