Athul Sreekumar
Books & writings

On reading slowly

Why I stopped counting the books I read each year, and what happened when I did.

For three years I kept a list. Fifty books, then sixty, then a number I was proud of and ashamed of at once, because I couldn’t remember half of them.

This year I read fewer. I read some of them twice. I copied sentences into a notebook by hand, which is slow, which is the point. A book read slowly stays in the body. You start to notice the commas.