We’re one month into the COVID-19 lockdown and an interesting phenomenon is beginning to emerge: Many people, myself included, are finding it difficult to finish a book. This comes as quite a surprise, considering that the lockdown has abruptly cleared our calendars of all appointments and social gatherings. One would think that those of us without parental responsibilities have more time to read now. And yet my Twitter feed is awash with people admitting they find it hard to concentrate on anything longer than short form articles.
What’s going on here? The simple answer is that it’s hard to focus when you’re stressed out and distracted. The pandemic has dramatically upended our daily habits and cast a cloud of uncertainty over our lives. We don’t know when and how this is going to end. There’s a lot that even expert virologists don’t understand about the coronavirus yet. Add to this our collective anxiety about the economic fallout and the fact that we’ve just witnessed the fastest stock market crash ever. Viewed from this angle, it’s not at all surprising that my “tsundoku pile” has been collecting dust lately.
To find my way back to books, I’ve decided to hold myself accountable to a public reading discipline. Over the next months, I’m going to share tweet-length reviews of books that I bought during pre-pandemic times but never quite got around to reading. If you’re reading this in a couple of weeks and I have posted less books than you have fingers on two hands, I’m falling short:
https://www.muellerfreitag.com/essays/the-pandemic-book-club
Enjoy and stay tuned!