We've Lost Our Ability To Read Fiction, Here's How To Get It Back

Welcome to the second 1-2-Read letter for paid subscribers! Every issue will give you a practical idea and two journal prompts to help you level up your reading practice during the week. Your contributions keep the lights on around here, and thank you so much for your support!

Fiction reading is a whole can of worms because it looks easy, but when most people sit down to read fiction as adults, they’re stunned at how bad they are at it. 

·      They can’t follow the story

·      They struggle to work through descriptions

·      They can’t feel the emotions of the narrative

·      They can no longer get sucked into a story like they used to

And these fictional struggles usually come with another strange feeling: as we get older, non-fiction usually gets easier to read, but fiction reading slowly becomes impossible. This boggles our minds because there was a time when it was the other way around.

So, with this question in mind, I sat down with Professor Rita Felski last week for an interview for a chapter of my book (Given that the book is still a work-in-progress, I’m not authorised to quote the interview directly, and I’m only going to source the ideas from her books in this post). She’s somewhat of a personal hero to me, because her work isn’t afraid to ask the forbidden question: what is literature for? And her books were some of the most interesting accounts of different uses of literature.