Over the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion on social media about the decline in literacy. People are quick to find something to blame: smartphones (short-form video content in particular), video games, etc. I don't want to join the chorus of those voices. Instead, I want to share how I fell in love with reading in my late twenties, because until I was 28, I barely read.

As a child, my mother tried everything to make my older sister and me read. She succeeded with my sister, and while she was plowing through Harry Potter, I preferred to play with Lego. In school, I never bothered with reading assignments. Instead, I would skim through the books the day before my exams. On the rare occasion when I read a book as a teenager, it had something to do with Warcraft lore.

Years passed, the bookshelf in my room stayed mostly empty, and I became an adult. Then I wanted to start reading books again when I turned twenty. By this point in my life, I spent most of my leisure time on social media, following a lot of people who I assumed were smart. They all read those difficult books. In what I can now only assume was an act of rebellion against my rather conservative, libertarian upbringing, I went on a shopping spree and ended up with a pile of books the likes of which you'd usually find on the bookshelf of a pretentious, "leftish" student's dorm room. Having amassed the pile, I then... barely touched it.

I dragged myself through the works of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, while the more theoretical works gathered dust on the bookshelf of my messy student dorm room. After admitting to myself that I didn't actually care about leftist theory (or being a leftist at all), I then pivoted to science fiction. After spending more money on books I got from a "CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION YOU HAVE TO READ" Goodreads list, I was able to read a handful of them. I didn't want to read, though. My interests were partying and drinking. Nursing a hangover five days a week was quite counterproductive.

As I prepared to head back to university for my sixth semester, the pandemic hit. I found myself back in my hometown, locked inside my childhood room. I spent the endless days on Discord, where I met a woman (who later became my wife) who worked night shifts in the hospital taking care of COVID patients. She told me she liked listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep. Truthfully, I don't quite recall how we ended up with the arrangement, but after I offered to read her a bedtime story (or she asked me to) to help her fall asleep, we established a reading ritual. When COVID restrictions relaxed and we first met face to face, we stumbled through a bookshop in Bonn where we picked up The Three-Body Problem. While she was driving home, I started reading it to her. Reading to my then-girlfriend was my daily ritual until we switched from a long-distance relationship to sharing an apartment. I enjoyed the Remembrance of Earth's Past series, and inspired by it, I powered through German and English translations of Chinese science fiction novels (I even started Chinese lessons), but as I finished university and started working in late 2021, this habit died out. I was back in a reading drought. Every so often, I managed to break out of it by reading the Dune series by Frank Herbert (and quickly giving up on the Dune books written by his son) or, after buying a Kindle, reading Into the Wild and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

Afterwards, I barely read for a year, until the summer holidays in 2024, when, building on my earlier experience from Jon Krakauer, I decided to pick up books about mountaineering. As someone who suffers from a fear of heights, I had never shown much interest in the mountains before, but something clicked: I was hooked and blew through books by Ed Viesturs, Eric Shipton, Mick Conefrey and David Roberts. After years of searching, I had found a topic I was interested in. As someone who has been a shut-in for most of my life, I was thrilled by the experience of being "teleported" to remote mountains, witnessing feats of strength under unimaginably harsh conditions. From then on, reading became easier for me. I started replacing time spent on video games, Netflix and doomscrolling with reading. Soon I had established a ritual—I read 10 minutes every morning before heading out to work. And often, I'm late because those 10 minutes quickly turn into 45. Reading itself was never the problem. I just hadn't found a topic that truly interested me.

Conclusion

If I had to summarize what I learned about building a reading habit in the last six years, it would be:

  • If you're unsure where to start, follow your curiosity: What topic, region or culture do you want to know more about?

  • Try out books even if you don't normally like their themes. You might be pleasantly surprised!

  • If you can't make it through a book and it feels more like a chore than a joy, put the book on hold and read another one. If you haven't finished it after six months, accept defeat and drop it.

  • As with every habit, turn it into a ritual. I would recommend replacing the morning doomscroll session with a few pages.

  • As your leisure time is limited, you have to replace another activity with reading.

  • Don't read on your phone; you'll get distracted.

I'm glad I was able to revive my interest in books. Reading about mountaineering made me want to spend more time in nature, which has led me to discover a love of cycling. Reading about Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan instilled in me a deep sense of gratitude for the natural world and awakened an interest in Buddhism that has led me to develop a meditation habit. Without reading, I would also never have started journaling. Reading enriches my life in a way that few other activities can.

AI disclaimer: As English is my second language, I've used ChatGPT to check for grammatical errors. The prose itself is entirely my own.