I got myself (three pairs of) new glasses last month. Somewhere in the middle of the eye test and the final fitting pick-up, I realized something else had changed along with my eyesight. I’ve become almost impossibly picky about what I’ll actually read.

A few years ago, my sister-in-law gave me a stack of romance novels for my birthday. They’re still sitting there, spines uncracked. I like Stephen King’s writing and won’t go near him because (once) he scared the hell out of me. I like Margaret Atwood and still haven’t worked through half of what she’s written. There are 200 items in my Kindle account.  Most of them are still unread. 

None of this used to be me.

I used to be the kid who finished twenty books a week. In my twenties I switched to business books, ten or fifteen a week, and kept that pace for most of two decades. Then Harry Potter showed up, and that was the end of the marathon reading.

These days I subscribe to a few hundred writers between Substack, newspapers, and other knowledge platforms, pay for maybe fifteen in total, and mostly listen instead of read because the audio concept lets me do something else at the same time.  I don’t think I’ll ever destroy this wild idea to constantly multi-task.

I tell you all of that not to list my habits but to show you the shape of the change. It’s not that I read less. It’s that something about the reading itself has gotten harder, and I genuinely don’t know why.

Here’s the part that might surprise you.

I use AI for plenty of things, but never for summaries. Not once. I still want to go through a book front to back and work out the main ideas myself. If the problem were really about not having enough time, a summary would solve it. It doesn’t, because that was never the problem.

Something about the act of reading itself has gotten more strenuous. Whether it’s my eyes or my attention or something else I haven’t named yet.

So I’m asking you directly. Have your reading habits changed? If so, do you know why, or are you still working that out too?