Books offer great escape from news feed overkill
Every Sunday morning a report appears on my phone. It tells me the average time I spent looking at my phone each day over the prior week, which, until recently, was around three hours. Wow, you might think, that’s a lot of screen time, and I would agree. However, the majority of that time was spent reading news and analysis.
Broadcast television pieces are too short for in-depth reporting, while cable news channels — both conservative and liberal — are repetitive and patently skewed to partisan emotions. Instead, I listen to NPR and read multiple publications that are well rated by the independent media watchdog, Ad Fontes Media.
I start each morning with newsletters from both the left-leaning New York Times and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal. Comparing their daily headlines — which reveals what is most important to their respective audiences — as well as the differences in coverage of any issue or event, is insightful.
Throughout the day, other newsletters appear in my email inbox from both publications, as well as from the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Akron Beacon Journal and Signal. I signed up for most of these during Trump’s presidency. Between Trump’s unconventional everything and the first pandemic in a century, I went from a well-informed voter to someone who consumed news like I was drinking from a fire hose.
Then, a few months after Biden’s inauguration, a shift occurred. Politics quieted down and vaccinations for COVID rolled out, reducing the risk of contracting the virus. Life slowly began to feel less chaotic and dangerous and my daily news consumption dropped from full-blast fire-hose to a two-liter bottle consumed in sips. This allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of listening to music and reading books.
I’ve enjoyed reading in bed at day’s end since childhood. I was one of those kids who’d surreptitiously read under the covers with a flashlight. But let’s be real, nowadays my head starts to bob two pages into any reading after 8 p.m.
This is why I also began to read books in the morning before getting out of bed and while eating lunch. Before long, an ineffable shift soon occurred. I became less anxious about the state of the world and more able to let go of things I cannot control.
However, starting in 2022, national politics once again became as impossible to turn away from as a 100-car train wreck. Eye-popping Supreme Court decisions, a presidential race that was setting up to be a replay of the last one until, whoah, that June debate, an assassination attempt of the former president and then the history-making changes of the Democratic ticket. Whew! Remember at the beginning of the year when I wrote that this would be a strap-onyour-seatbelts year in politics? What an understatement.
Having recently lived through dramatic times, when I found myself once again reading multiple takes on every issue from the economy to reproductive and voting rights to climate change to education and more, I quickly questioned if this was necessary. Ok, maybe a yes on education. But for all other topics, I am once again limiting my intake, which feels healthy. While being an informed citizen is critically important, my ability to change the trajectory of current policy and history is limited. No matter one’s political perspective, an excessive consumption of news only serves to aggravate the consumer.
This summer I resumed my effort to balance my reading diet with more books. My 14-year-old son, Leif, and I started our own two-person book club. I picked “Parable of the Sower” because I love Octavia Butler and he likes science fiction. A post-apocalyptic novel with a protagonist who is Leif’s age, “Parable of the Sower” is more grim than I expected, yet Leif did not want to stop reading it when I gave him the option.
To keep myself from sliding back to over-reading news stories, I’ve assigned myself a book a week. Separate from my mother-son book club, I’m enjoying “Confederacy of Dunces,” a book long recommended to me by many. And while my home has piles of unread books, I’m tempted to buy more from the New York Times’s recently published list of the best 100 books of the 21st century, particularly “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver, another favorite author of mine.
Reading good books may not directly change the state of affairs. But it does give one’s brain a break, which is important at a time when it is easy to get worked up about everything everywhere all at once. And in that break, fresh perspectives might take root and grow. Now if only there was a way to receive a book-reading report at the end of each week.