There's a particular kind of grief that doesn't announce itself. It arrives quietly — in a statistic, a policy change, a film that bombed on release but became a classic decades later. Right now, several threads in the literary world are pulling at the same loose seam: things we value are slipping away, and we're only just noticing.
Start with this: 75% of people find well-read partners more attractive, yet Americans are reading less than ever. That's not just an irony — it's a cultural contradiction we're living inside. We romanticize reading. We put it on dating profiles. We gift books at weddings. And then we quietly stop doing it.
This isn't about screens versus pages. It's about what we've decided deserves our attention. Reading, like most things worth doing, requires a kind of faith — that the time spent will return something you couldn't have predicted when you started. That faith is eroding.