The summer of the reading slump?
Plus: Shoutout Ann Patchett
Hi everyone,
Today’s newsletter is about reading. I know we have quite a few bookworms in the Money Moves community, so hopefully you will indulge this summer books supplement.
In today’s issue:
1. The summer of the reading slump?
2. Shoutout Ann Patchett
3. On my (bookish) radar
The summer of the reading slump?
I will read anything about being in a reading slump, an irony that is not lost on me. It is similar to reading about other writers’ writing practices. I could just go do the thing, instead of reading about other people doing it, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I need to spend the majority of my time ruminating and self-flagellating and, most importantly, not doing the thing.
Anyway, John Paul Brammer had a great essay a few weeks ago about learning to become a reader after many years of not reading. “My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better,” Brammer writes of the many benefits of reading. “Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.”
While I am coming to this from a different angle—of being a lifelong reader who has pretty regular slumps (and has been in one basically this whole year)—reading his essay made me yearn to get lost in a book again. The author Jade Chang is experiencing something similar, as she revealed to fellow author/journalist Ann Friedman. They in turn linked to author Elif Batuman’s similar missive, published this past week.
Side note: I chuckled when Chang noted “three’s a trend” about Brammer’s, Batuman’s, and her own reading slumps, as I had the same exact thought while reading her newsletter. Here I am, a fourth!
“As someone who is really into reading, one experience I am surprised not to read about more frequently is ‘reading slumps’: those periods when you can’t get into any book, and every book is somehow annoying, yet you feel bereft to not have anything to read,” Batuman begins her essay.
These are feelings I know well. But I am in particularly dire straits right now. I have finished just six books this year (plus a couple for work), a far cry from my normal cadence. Less on my mind is accomplishing some specific reading goal (though usually it is 24 non-work books per year), and more what Batuman is getting at—feeling uninspired and even unmoored, of nothing breaking through or taking hold, of nothing encouraging further reflection.
More worryingly still, I wonder if my attention span is, simply, broken. I bemoan short-form content and everyone else’s inability to read an entire article, and then I myself read very little.
So I have asked friends for recommendations, scoured mid-year best-of lists from mainstream publications and personal newsletters alike, and reviewed (and re-reviewed) my own TBR pile. Nothing calls.
I just finished an award-winning book that is certainly good, but not one I would say had me glued to the page. The desire to be completely swept up in a book, to underline sentences and then copy them into my journal, to be inspired to write terrible sentences of my own, remains.
***
The writer Austin Kleon promotes a practice I love about establishing your own artistic genealogy. Basically, if you love an artist, look to their inspirations for more inspiration—or simply enjoyment—of your own. In this way, you can grow your own creative family tree. Kleon cites fellow writer Alan Jacobs, who encourages “swimming upstream”:
We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers… If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits…
This is a practice that has served me well in the past. I will follow one author or inspiration to the next; it is how I have found some of the most influential books, writers, and music in my life.
So I was kind of delighted to see musician Jensen McRae comment on Batuman’s reading slump essay. I had just been listening to her song “My Ego Dies At the End” maybe 30 minutes prior thanks to the Spotify radio playlist for a different artist, and it all felt sort of like kismet.
When a coincidence like that pop ups—if a theme or topic or musical artist, for example, keeps recurring in my life in a particular timeframe—I take that as a sign from the universe to pay attention. And so that is my cue to read some of the other books mentioned in Batuman’s piece as well as the comments. Clearly there is some sort of invisible string between two creatives I would not have otherwise connected, and it makes sense, to me, that the art they in turn reference might be what I’m missing.
Of the other books mentioned, I have already read Lena Dunham’s Famesick (one of the few books I gobbled up this year), but I am now interested in Joan Silber’s In the City and Colm Tóibín’s The Magician. Reading these books would also allow me to check off two other distinct reading goals for the year: 1) I read multiple Tóibíns last year and enjoyed them, so this also gets me closer to finishing an author’s entire oeuvre; and 2) Silber’s accomplishes my desire to read older books.
I don’t always need to be inspired by what I read (give me a competently written twisty mystery any day), but I do think that is what has been missing of late. When I look through my book log, I see a lot of trendy novels that fell flat in my reading and popular genre books that I can barely remember a single plot point of. There is nothing wrong with those books. But there is clearly something wrong when I feel no desire to return to them, or to seek out others like them.
Unlike Brammer and Batuman, I’m not out of the woods yet. I’m still slumping, hopeful that engaging in this artistic lineage is the cure.
Perhaps you have your own tried and true methods for breaking out of a reading rut?
Shoutout Ann Patchett
Speaking of inspirations, I was delighted to see this week that Ann Patchett is receiving the 2026 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, even if I was unaware that this prize existed until I saw the news.
“The award seeks to recognize strong, unique, enduring voices that, throughout long and consistently accomplished careers, have told us something about the American experience,” the Library of Congress’s release says. It is given to an American literary writer “whose body of work is distinguished by its mastery of the art, as well as its originality of thought and imagination.”
Patchett is the best-selling author of 10 novels as well as nonfiction, essay collections, and children’s books. She has won like every literary award out there, and for good reason.
I have read six of her works:
The Dutch House
Bel Canto
Tom Lake
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
One of the things I am most amazed by with Patchett is how different all of the plots of her books are (except maybe Commonwealth and The Dutch House, in some ways) but they are still very much Patchett.
I also just generally dig her vibe. She owns a bookstore in Nashville and is always promoting new books and authors. In other words, living the dream!
As noted above, one of my general reading goals is to finish an author’s entire body of work, and Ann is a decent contender (it has to be author with a fairly lengthy catalog). Her new book sounds right up my alley.
Did you know TED is still a thing? Here is Patchett’s recent TED talk about…reading!
On my (bookish) radar
Ann Friedman on beach reads: “It can be surprisingly difficult, once you've aged out of your youthful voracious-reader phase and into the stresses and time constraints of adulthood, to figure out your personal beach read. To know what sort of book is almost certain to delight you and sweep you away.”
An interesting bookish activity for all of those unread books on your shelf, courtesy of Ann Friedman’s newsletter.
On reading with a newborn: “Reading this way—without pretense or purpose beyond entertainment and company—feels restorative, like sipping ginger tea or cocooning under a blanket. It’s also a treat to have the time to, yes, binge on sentences.”
Pandora Sykes on how to read more. Also from her newsletter, a bunch of peoples’ favorite books of 2026 so far.
John Paul Brammer, again, on performative reading: “What lends books their modern moral valence is that literature stands in opposition to the Goliath of our age. As low-effort distractions monopolize our attention, literature challenges us in the right way. Where social media makes us incurious, reactionary, and cynical, literature requires nuance, patience, and critical thinking.”
I refuse to read The Atlantic article about how no one is reading anymore because I think it would make me too upset.
That’s it for now. See ya soon,
A
P.S. Thanks Christopher Skinner for the illustrations!
Naomi Alderman is doing a summer reading "5K for reading" - reading helpful.