Finding Time to Read

October 2018 found me anxious during my first year as a PhD student. I was swamped with my weekly reading and writing assignments.

My stack of books for one week’s worth of reading included a translation of Fariduddin Attar’s The Conference of the Birds; Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book II; Thomas Hoccleve’s “Complaint” and “Lerne to Dye;” a chunk of Tottel’s Miscellany; and Congreve’s The Way of the World. None of these are particularly long works (comparatively speaking), but, on top of the essays required, I was also preparing for my Generals exam at the start of the next academic year.

(The Generals exam ensures that PhD graduates aren’t hyper-specialists and can teach with competency across all periods of literature and theory. It is a 75-minute oral examination, conducted by three English professors, all experts in their fields, on a list of 137 works from Plato to Sylvia Plath. To remain in the program, each graduate student had to pass it. I, who spent my undergraduate and master’s programs specializing in Romanticism, was decidedly not a generalist at that time and had a lot of reading to make up for.)

When I off-handedly complained about the reading-load, my advisor told me something I never forgot. “It is not likely,” he said, “that you will ever be given again what you have now: a stipend and time to study the greatest works of literature and the liberty to pursue your own literary interests.” My four years of study was a privilege not to be taken for granted.

Now, after graduating, I see how valuable were those early years dedicated to reading.

From my own experience, I’m learning just how much reading is constrained by work, care responsibilities, digital distraction, world news, and scarcity of attention. To get a clearer picture of how readers are making time to read, I surveyed readers on Versed Community. I was curious about how they managed to read as much as they do. I learned a lot about the strategic tactics they adopt to maintain a meaningful literary practice.

What Keeps Readers from Reading?

It is important to acknowledge both the difficulty of being well read and the privilege of having the time to read long works of literature. My last essay of 2025, The Complete English Literature List, received mixed responses of interest, gratitude, and, in some cases, incredulity that I could have possibly read all that I had listed. But another common response to the list was something akin to discouragement, almost despair—a sense of the overwhelming weight of the many hours, days, years that it would take to read a fraction of that list.

While I try to be transparent about my own blind spots (I’m no lover of the 18th-century stage, and I had left Bleak House unfinished), much of what else I have read, especially the works that are most important to me, were not included. But what wasn’t transparent is the amount of time and privilege that allowed me to read as much as I had.

On Substack, you can get the sense that not having read a classic is a moral failure. “Just read them.” “It’s not that hard.” “Don’t die without having read [insert great book here]!” I agree: read the great novels. But are we forgetting that the average American works over 40 hours a week? The 40+ hours I work each week just happen to involve literary work. But what about the parents, front-line workers, the retailers, small business owners, caretakers, and all those for whom leisure is unevenly distributed?¹ The folks on Versed helped understand this better.

It turns out that workload is only a partial obstacle. The data gathered from readers bears this out. Among respondents, those working 40–50 hours a week reported reading an average of 6–10 hours weekly (far less than retired or part-time workers, some of whom read 20–30 hours). Others rightly noted that much of their busyness is not expendable. Reading time yields to rest, health, love of neighbors (as it should).²

Another reported using their smartphones to read during vacant minutes at work. A page here and a page there adds up. Several described commute reading, audiobooks paired with doing the dishes. For many, the reading is accomplished by reclaiming attention from frictionless scrolling.

The numbers also suggest that entertainment is often the trade-off for reading, not work. One respondent working 50 hours still managed 15 hours of reading by replacing nearly all forms of digital entertainment with books. Another, working 40 hours with two young children, read only 5 hours, because care and rest came first. Several respondents who read 14+ hours weekly reported 5 or fewer hours of entertainment. One 45-year-old working full-time reads 14 hours and watches 12 hours of entertainment per week. Conversely, a 26-year-old working 40 hours but watching 9 hours of entertainment reads 7 hours. A full-time worker with two children under five years described reading as a matter of trade-offs: Netflix, video games, scrolling social media are the expendables.

One easy solution is to trade digital entertainment for books. But some respondents rejected the very premise that reading must compete with entertainment at all. A homeschooling parent described how audiobooks allow literature to live inside a day already full of interruptions (another reason why I think the audiobooks-vs.-print debate misses the point).

One recurring theme was resistance to the way reading has been absorbed into a culture of performance. Apps like Goodreads and StoryGraph, and digital ecologies like BookTok and Substack have undeniably encouraged reading, but they also tend to turn it into a quantified achievement.

What gets lost is what one reader called a sustained relationship with literature, a relationship that waxes and wanes across a life. Reading 10 pages slowly, or rereading a single poem is often more meaningful. “Not everything has to be a competition,” one commenter wrote.

The fact is, you will die having not read a classic. It may be a tragedy, but it won’t be a tragedy on scale with having read everything too hastily or nothing at all.

A Few Provisional Conclusions

1. Reading in the twenty-first century involves a repertoire of tactics that may include print, audio, rereading, fragmentary attention, solitude, and social discussion, each of which may be activated under different conditions.

2. Moralizing reading habits often misunderstands how reading actually survives across a life.

3. Where once access to great books was scarce, now attention is the scarcest resource. We live amid unprecedented availability of books and unprecedented pressure on reading-time.

4. Saying yes to reading always means saying no to something else, and sometimes the right answer is not to read.

As Hippocrates said long ago, “Life is short, art is long.” Human life is tragically brief, and the amount of literature one should read accumulates each day. That’s why the lists of “core books” is so important. The literary canon is a standard of judgment, a list of works agreed upon by a general consensus of readers that represents what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought or said.”

I hoped “The Complete List of English Literature” may begin to recover a systematic approach to the study of English literature that existed before the neglect of canons and curricula within American university English departments. Although it is not as inclusive as the canon is today, it remains the touchstone for further canon-expansion and future diversity. The list I shared was never meant to function as a personal challenge or a universal prescription. It was, among other things, a map of what institutions once deemed essential. The list can orient us, but it should not weigh us down.

Some Practical Steps

Reading tactics are essential. To survive a culture of attention scarcity, readers increasingly turn to audiobooks, short “reading streaks,” curated lists, and spare minutes here and there. When used wisely, the smartphone proves a great aid to reading.

Intellectual curiosity does not have to be eclipsed by short‑term gratification. Many readers deliberately carve out time for both entertainment and substantive reading.

In his Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman offers helpful advice. The first is to treat your TBR list as a river, not a bucket:

“That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by.”

Burkeman’s second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge:

“At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all.”

Finally, remember to follow your interests. Literary taste is an aspect of your personality. When you discover what books you like to read, you learn something new about yourself. Burkeman writes, “remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. . . . Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun.”

What my advisor understood, and what I grasped later, was that reading is seldom simply a matter of discipline or virtue. It is a matter of time, permission, circumstance, and often privilege. I was fortunate to have been granted a few years devoted to books. Anyone’s accomplished reading in these times should produce humility not a sense of superiority.

Readers, critics, and teachers should recognize how rare and fragile the conditions for sustained reading really are. We should help to promote a culture that accommodates and supports time for the study of literature. We also must resist the expectation that reading must justify itself through mastery or display. Faced with the long arc of art and the short span of life, the most appropriate response is gratitude for what we can read, patience for what we cannot, and admiration for those whose circumstances make reading itself a heroic feat.

Preview Image: Virginia Woolf, 1926. Photograph by Ottoline Morrell. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

1. In “note-form” this statement was polarizing and, based on some pushback, I went on to revise my opinion in a separate note here.

2. As A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. wrote: “A country priest who devotes himself to his parishioners, a doctor who turns away from study to give help in urgent cases, a young man of good family who adopts a calling to help his people and in doing so has to turn his back on liberal studies, are not profaning the gift that is in them, they are paying homage to the True which is one and the same being with the Good. If they acted otherwise they would offend truth no less than virtue, since, indirectly, they would be setting living truth at variance with itself.” See The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, Chapter II “The Virtues of a Catholic Intellectual.”