The Unhurried Page

Speed has become a moral category. We praise the friend who finished forty books this year as though reading were a race with a finish line and a medal.

But what is the hurry actually for?

Against the count

The number of books you read is the least interesting thing about your reading life. Far more interesting: which sentence you have carried for a decade. Which character you argue with in the shower. Which book you have read three times and understood differently each time.

Read for the one sentence you will carry for a decade.

A slow season of reading is not a failure of ambition. It is a different ambition entirely, to be changed by a book rather than merely to have passed through it.