1. You Must Read

Reading is an exercise in cultivating attention. On some small level, it represents a rebellion against multibillion dollar companies that want more than anything to control what you’re looking at 24/7.

Looking at your phone or computer all day and seeing ads for products and services convinces your brain that these things are important. Stepping back from that and focusing on a page strengthens your ability to zero in on what you choose to spend your time on rather than what money is being spent to direct your attention towards.

Reading is qualitatively different from listening to audiobooks, especially because many people do the latter while performing another task like cooking or driving. Making time to read and do nothing else is a gift to yourself in a world in which time seems to slip through our fingers and there is always something else that needs doing.

2. You Must Read Fiction

The crisis of literacy goes beyond a simple inability or unwillingness to read books at all. Some percentage of the population does regularly read books. However, their reading is limited to self-help books, studies of startups, and productivity guides. There are, of course, countless valuable non-fiction books that do not fall into these categories. But a diet of pure non-fiction reading robs you of the unique power of fictional narrative.

To commit to reading a novel is to push yourself to utilize your imagination. So much of our culture is now visual, to the point that our ability to develop rich mental images is deteriorating. Long form fiction requires the use of this ability and improves it.

Fiction allows you to viscerally imagine what it might be like to be another person in another time or place. It encourages empathy with and understanding of even those who seem radically different to ourselves. Equally important to this broadening of imagination, however, is that fiction has the wonderful capacity to make us feel less alone in our experiences. Reading a well-crafted novel, regardless of the subject matter, period or original language of its publication, can connect us to the commonalities that cut across history and geography.

Others have longed, feared, grappled, quarrelled, fucked, ruminated, explored, endured, lived and died before you, and do so around the world today. It doesn’t matter if they look(ed) or live(d) exactly like you — someone, somewhere has experienced what you are experiencing right now. Fiction helps us remember this essential truth.

3. You Must Read Adult Fiction

Young Adult fiction, progression fantasy, and romantasy have their place. But for the most part, they are escapist fantasies — of being special, being chosen, being adored. Fantasies are fine. Necessary and valuable, even. It’s when fantasy becomes the sole mode in which people are engaging with literature that it becomes a problem.

This should go without saying, but “adult fiction” does not exclusively mean realist novels about the unhappy lives of upper-middle class white Americans (although you may not want to write off that kind of book as a whole either). It simply means books that treat their readers as moral and intellectual adults who are attuned to the complexities of human interaction in a social and material context.

But I Don’t Want To/Reading is Hard/I Have a Condition That Prevents Me from Reading

So don’t. I’m not your dad.