I’m in a Reading Slump. I’ve Stopped Trying to Fix It.

Half a year has gone by and I haven’t finished a single book the way I’d hoped to.

Not for lack of trying. There’s a stack on my nightstand — three started, none past the halfway mark. I pick one up, read a page, realize I’ve absorbed nothing, and put it back down. Some nights I don’t even get to the page. I just look at the stack and feel a small, specific guilt, then reach for my phone instead.

If you searched “reading slump” to get here, you probably know the exact feeling I’m describing. So I’ll skip the part where I explain what a slump is. You’re living in one. So am I.

What I want to tell you is the thing that actually helped me — and it wasn’t a tip.

I read all the advice. It’s the same advice.

When my slump started, I did what you’re probably doing now. I read the articles. Every single one says roughly the same five things: reread an old favorite, try an audiobook, switch genres, read something short and fun, and put your phone in another room.

None of it is wrong. Some of it even helped a little. Rereading a book I loved got me through one evening. An audiobook made a long drive feel less wasted.

But here’s what I noticed after a while: every one of those articles was written by someone standing on the other side of the slump, looking back. They’d already climbed out. They were handing down the rope. And I was still down in the hole, doing everything the rope-holders said, and not moving.

At some point the advice itself started to feel like the problem. Because underneath all of it was one quiet assumption: that a slump is a malfunction. Something broken in you that needs fixing, and fast, before you lose your identity as A Person Who Reads.

That assumption was the heaviest thing I was carrying. Heavier than the actual not-reading.

What a slump actually is, for me

Here’s the reframe that changed things, and I want to be honest that it’s a reframe, not a cure.

I stopped asking “how do I fix this” and started asking “what is this.”

And when I looked at it plainly, my reading slump wasn’t mysterious at all. It lined up almost exactly with a stretch of months where my job got heavier, my sleep got worse, and my attention was being pulled in six directions before 10am. My brain wasn’t broken. It was full. Reading is the most attention-hungry thing I do all day, and I was trying to do it with the least attention I’ve had in years.

Of course I stalled. A slump wasn’t a failure of discipline. It was an accurate signal about the state of the rest of my life.

That didn’t magically make me want to read. But it dissolved the guilt. And the guilt, it turned out, was doing more damage than the slump. Every night I didn’t read, I wasn’t just not-reading — I was also confirming a story that something was wrong with me. Drop the story, and all that’s left is a person who’s tired and busy and will probably read again when things settle. Which is a much easier thing to live with.

The other thing I had to face was attention itself — I couldn’t focus while reading even on books I liked, and that needed its own fix.

What I’m actually doing (since you came here for something to try)

I’m not going to pretend the reframe alone got me reading again, because it didn’t. But a few small, low-pressure things have put me closer to books than I’ve been in months. None of them are “read 20 pages a night.” All of them assume you have almost no attention to spare, because that’s the whole point.

I lowered the bar to something almost insultingly small. Not “read a chapter.” Read one page. If I want to stop after one page, I stop, and it counts. The goal isn’t to read a book. It’s to make the book a non-threatening object again — something I can pick up without a whole identity riding on it. Some nights one page becomes ten. Most nights it stays one. Both are fine.

I stopped forcing the “important” books. My stack was all the books I thought I should read — the dense, improving ones. I’ve set those aside without guilt and I’m only allowing myself things that are easy and a little bit fun. This is the one piece of standard advice I’d actually underline, because it works: a slump is not the time for the book that makes you a better person. It’s the time for the book you’d have devoured at fourteen. If you want the specific criteria I now use to choose one — and the five books that pass — I wrote how I actually pick a book to get out of a reading slump.

I moved reading off the nightstand. Nighttime was when I had the least attention left, and I was assigning my hardest activity to my emptiest tank. Now I read for a few minutes with my morning coffee, before the day gets its hands on me. Small change, bigger difference than I expected.

And I stopped counting. No yearly goal, no tracking app, no number to fall behind on. The moment reading has a scoreboard, a slow month becomes a visible failure. I removed the scoreboard. There’s nothing to be behind on now. Which, I realized later, is the same trap I’d fallen into with remembering what I read — chasing a number, a total, an archive — until I let that go too. But that’s a whole other story.

Where I actually am

I want to end this honestly, the way I’d want someone to be honest with me.

I’m not out of the slump. If you’re looking for the paragraph where I tell you I read forty books after my big mindset shift, this isn’t that article, and I’d be suspicious of the ones that are.

What’s changed is smaller and, I think, more useful: I don’t dread the stack anymore. I’ve read more in the last two weeks than in the months before them, in one-page and ten-page pieces, none of it impressive, all of it real. And on the nights I still don’t read, I don’t add a second layer of feeling-bad on top. The slump costs me a little less than it used to. I’ve written more about this — about the books I haven’t finished and why I’m not giving up on them.

If that sounds like a modest result, it is. But I’d trade a dramatic recovery I don’t believe in for a modest one that’s actually mine.

If you’re in one too, here’s the only thing I’d genuinely suggest before any tip: stop treating it as evidence that something’s wrong with you. It’s usually just evidence that the rest of your life is loud right now. The reading comes back. It always has, for me — just never on the schedule I tried to force. When it does, the few books that actually stayed with me are here, and I add to that slowly.

— Still Set

I write about reading, work, and the spaces we do both in — mostly by noticing what actually happens instead of what’s supposed to.