There are one hundred and sixty-seven books in my apartment. I counted them on a Wednesday afternoon in August because I wanted to know the number, the way you sometimes want to know how far you are from the town you grew up in—the distance tells you something, even if you have no plans to drive there.

They live in different places: a shelf by the window, a stack on the nightstand that has achieved a sort of architectural confidence, and a novel on the kitchen counter that I set down four months ago to make coffee and that has simply become part of the room. Some of them I have read before. Some of them I have owned for years and never opened. All of them, every single one, are on the pile because a book I read eight years ago and can no longer summarize—and more importantly, recommend to a friend—belongs there just as much as a book I bought last Tuesday. I am a different reader than I was at nineteen, and so the book is different, too. That is closer to what reading was always supposed to be: a moving target, a relationship that changes depending on who shows up.

I should be honest about why the pile exists, though, and it is less romantic than the paragraph above.

The pile exists because I stopped reading.

Four years ago, roughly. The exact date is impossible to pin down because a reading slump has no clean starting line. It arrives like a weather system—one day you realize you have picked up your phone instead of your book for the sixth consecutive evening, and the evening before that, and the one before that, and at some point, the book migrated from your nightstand to the shelf and you told yourself you’d get back to it and you did not get back to it. The slump settled in and became the default.

What replaced reading was scrolling, which resembles reading in the same way that driving past a museum resembles going inside. The words are shorter. The ideas are pre-digested. Everything is designed to be consumed in the length of time it takes to wait for an elevator, and the result is an attention span trained to expect that nothing will ask more of it than thirty seconds. I became very good at reading tweets, captions, and the first two paragraphs of articles I had every intention of finishing. I became very bad at sitting with a book for longer than a chapter before reaching for my phone to check on absolutely nothing.

This is a familiar story. Nearly everyone I know has some version of it. The details change—some people lost it during the pandemic, some people lost it in college, some people lost it the day they downloaded TikTok—but the shape is the same. A person who used to read becomes a person who used to read. The books are still there. The capacity has gone somewhere else.

A person who used to read becomes a person who used to read.

I am writing about this because I recently had to write about it at length, in a chapter of a book I am finishing this year. The chapter is called “Cover to Cover,” and it forced me to sit with the full weight of what I had let happen to my reading life. Writing it required me to articulate something I had been avoiding: that the slump was not a phase. It was a habit. It had installed itself in the place where another habit used to live, and habits do not remove themselves. They have to be deliberately, tediously replaced.

So I am replacing it.

The practice is simple and unglamorous. Thirty minutes of reading a day. Paper only—no Kindle, no phone, no screen of any kind. The book has to be physical, something with a spine and weight, something that does not ping or refresh or offer a hyperlink to somewhere else. Thirty minutes does not sound like much, and that is the point. Four years of a destroyed attention span cannot be repaired by ambition. It has to be repaired by consistency, and consistency requires a bar low enough to actually clear every day, even the bad ones, even the tired ones, even the ones where thirty minutes feels like an hour.

I started with three books off the pile. I will spare you the details of which ones, because that is its own essay and its own argument and I am trying to stay on topic. The relevant thing is that I started, and that starting was harder than I expected it to be, and that it has gotten slightly easier in the way that most worthwhile things get easier—slowly, without fanfare, and only if you keep showing up.

The one hundred and sixty-seven books are still there. The pile will get bigger. I know this about myself with the certainty of someone who has never once walked out of a bookstore empty-handed and does not intend to start. I will keep acquiring books faster than I finish them, and I will feel nothing about this except appetite, because a growing pile is evidence of a mind that is still hungry for more than it can hold. The alternative—a person who has stopped reaching for things—is worse than any backlog.

The internet will tell you that a TBR pile is a problem to be optimized. A productivity failure. Something to be tracked and conquered and reduced to zero, as if the goal of reading is to be done with it. I think the pile is the point. I think the books on my shelf are doing something just by being there, the same way a kitchen full of ingredients does something even before you start cooking. They are possibility. They are proof that I still believe there are things worth sitting with, things worth giving thirty minutes to, things worth the slow and inconvenient work of paying attention to something that will never ping me back.

One hundred and sixty-seven. For now.