Books Mark as Read What Keeps You Reading? Becoming a reader is different than *staying* a reader… By Molly Templeton | Published on December 4, 2025 Portrait de Marguerite (The Reader) by Henri Matisse, 1906 Comment 0 Share New Share Portrait de Marguerite (The Reader) by Henri Matisse, 1906 Lately, it feels like every time I log on, there’s a new article or post bemoaning the state of reading. Some of it is genuinely distressing; some of it draws a bit more of a side-eye, from me at least. A Smithsonian headline says “Reading for Pleasure Has Declined by a ‘Deeply Concerning’ 40 Percent Over the Past Two Decades.” I don’t want to rehash the content of all of these articles, which talk about everything from the lure of social media to the sad percentage of adults who read to children to the question of whether “performative reading” is a thing and what the term itself means. But I have been thinking about a different facet of the same topic: The people who read all the time. The kids who love books; the friends whose reading I simply cannot keep up with; the booming corners of the publishing industry, where dragons and faeries rule over all. Last month, I went to the Portland Book Festival, where the presence of Rebecca Yarros was unmissable: there were Basgiath War College sweatshirts aplenty, plus dragon imagery everywhere and women with their hair in elaborate braids that I began to understand marked them as Fourth Wing fans. The festival is always lively and well-attended, but this year, it sold out for the first time ever. And the crowd was a little different than usual, or at least looked that way. Some people aren’t reading. But some people are reading a lot. Not everything is darkness. Publishing would not put out books like Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books if there were no market for such books. Last year, Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore was a bestseller. Char Adams’ Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore just came out last month. There are countless books about books, booksellers, publishers; journals about reading; gift items in the shape of books or designed to make you think about books; book-related tarot cards; bookish mugs and scarves and bags and magnets. Being a capital-R Reader has never felt as commodified as it does right now. Book people are clearly a market. There can’t be that few of us.  I find it hard to imagine not being a reader. I was that cliched kid who would read the back of the cereal box if there was nothing else available. I’ve read really, really random books out of sheer desperation, having underestimated my book needs on a trip to a place with no bookstore. Before phones, there was always a book in my bag; now I rarely carry a bag, but there is always something to read on my phone.  But I can also see that if only a few things were different in my childhood, I might have turned out otherwise. What if my grandmother didn’t teach me to read long before I started school? What if my house hadn’t been filled with books? What if my parents hadn’t allowed me to read anything I wanted? What if my mom didn’t read Le Guin and Tolkien to me? What if I didn’t get to make regular trips to the library? What if there had been social media when I was young? Any life is filled with these variables, the things that, had they been different, might have led us down such different paths. Some big, some small, some life-changing. I wonder what could change, still, for the people who take no joy in reading.  Becoming a reader, though, is different than staying a reader. When I’m thinking about these columns, sometimes I make my way through a series of blogs, websites, forums, newspapers, browsing around to see what people are talking and thinking about. There is always someone finding something new, and always someone struggling to sustain their joy. There’s always a list post made up entirely of obvious books and one that’s full of surprises. Now, especially, is the time of lists—all these best-of wrap-ups full of books I’ve not gotten to yet. (There are at least 50 titles on my list of “2025 books I wish to read someday”).  Still, even when I’m overwhelmed, overworked, stressed out, mid-move, missing deadlines, worrying about the world, furious at the world—in all of these times, I’m reading. Or I’m trying to read. At the very least I am putting the books I plan to read next into a stack in the middle of the room, where I can’t help but see them. Sustaining this habit is a priority because I make it one. What keeps me reading? Curiosity, more than anything. What’s out there? What don’t I know about? What will I learn from the next thing I read—about writing, about history, about people, about a place in the world, about trauma and conflict and love and contentment? Where can I go in a book that I may never go in real life? What can I take from a book to use in my own writing? What will inspire me or make me cry or leave me so rapt that I don’t want to watch TV or leave the house or anything? Why does it do that? How does it do that? What else is out there? What is it like to be in someone else’s head? What is it like to live in their space, to walk their roads? Reading, for me, is the single best way to experience lives I will never live. Watching TV and movies is delightful, magical, enjoyable, but it’s watching, and watching is different than reading. Reading, I’m in charge of the pace, how quickly or slowly I follow or race through the words. I’m in charge of casting, location, setting. The image that forms in my head may or may not exactly match the author’s description, but whatever it is, it’s something my brain—my store of ideas and visuals and references—cooks up to accompany the prose. Sometimes, it feels like practice for living.  I don’t mean to be too terribly grandiose. I have grown wary of the reading-is-good-for-you positions, the but-you-need-it-for-empathy arguments that seem to posit reading as a moral good. There are plenty of things a person can read that are not going to add to their own personal moral goodness quotient. I’m not reading because it’s good for me. Reading isn’t vegetables! I’m reading because I can’t imagine not—and because I want all the things that books encourage me to imagine.  What keeps you reading? How did books and stories come to matter in your life? Each of us has a story about how we got this way, don’t we?[end-mark] The post What Keeps You Reading? appeared first on Reactor.