Why This Book Had to be Written
This book did not begin as a project. It began as a pressure. And just wrote itself, meandering through umpteen unpaved terrains of emotions and states.
Over years of reading - often in fragments, under strain, in conditions far from ideal - a question kept returning: what does reading actually do to us when it works? Not as nostalgia. Not as virtue-signaling. But as a lived cognitive and emotional act.
The Art of the Read wrote itself in response to that question.
It emerged from the sense that reading had quietly changed in our lives - flattened by speed, interrupted by scrolls, instrumentalized by summaries - while we continued to talk about it as if nothing had shifted. The book does not mourn a lost golden age. It asks something more practical and more urgent: how do we read now, in the world as it is, without surrendering depth, memory, or interior space?
The writing draws on many terrains - neuroscience, psychology, education, literature - but its real test has always been lived use. Much of this book was shaped while reading was not a leisure activity, but a way of staying oriented: during exhaustion, loss, uncertainty, and long stretches where attention itself felt fragile.
That experience clarified something essential. Reading is not a hobby we either keep up or abandon. It is a practice we renegotiate across phases of life. When it fails, it is rarely because we lack discipline. More often, the conditions around it have changed.
This book is an attempt to change those conditions back - quietly, patiently, one reader at a time.
Not to make us read more.
But to help us read better.