What’s happened to reading during the COVID-19 pandemic? Some people are too busy or stressed to read, while others are reading more than ever but in different ways. Leah Price is interested in historical precedents for what we’re experiencing now, from anxieties about catching diseases from library books to the fantasy of reading as refuge from the world. History shows that reading is affected by people’s working lives – some can’t read because they have to work, others read because they can’t work. COVID-19 is transforming the way we work, so reading too will change – but not necessarily for the worse.
Bonus clip
Leah discusses what children’s books can teach us about screen-reading fatigue.
Further reading
Leah Price at The New York Review of Books – Page-Turners
Merve Emre at Public Books – Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos (and click here for our conversation with Merve)
Stephen Greenblatt at The New Yorker – What Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague (and click here for our conversation with Stephen)
Joseph Hayes at Smithsonian Magazine – When the Public Feared That Library Books Could Spread Deadly Diseases
Kiran Misra at The Guardian – Why you should ignore the pressure to be productive during lockdown
Amanda Shapiro at Bon Appétit – There’s No Better Time to… Read a Cookbook Like a Book-Book
Maxine Whittaker at The Conversation – How infectious diseases have shaped our culture, habits and language
Tobias Carroll at Vulture – Pandemics: An Essential Reading List
Andrew R. Chow and Annabel Gutterman at Time – Indie Bookstores Are Fighting to Survive the Pandemic. A New Movement May Have the Answer
Tom Loveless at Brookings – Girls, boys, and reading