I want to talk about the experience of being in a reading slump and what comes out of it. Every serious reader I know has periods — sometimes weeks, sometimes months — when books don't land. You pick them up, read twenty pages, put them down. Pick up another one. Put that down too.

I've learned that reading slumps are rarely about reading. They're about attention. Something else has the attention that reading requires, and the books are competing and losing. The solution is not to push through with difficult books. The solution is to read something that has such a strong narrative pull that it borrows the attention before the distraction can claim it.

My reading-slump books: Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, which is about sailing and friendship and is hypnotic. The Big Sleep by Chandler, which moves fast and is never boring. Going Postal by Pratchett, which is funny and warm and requires nothing of you except to be present. These are not lesser books. They're tools for restoring capacity.