How Do You Think?

In lieu of a thesis, a question for readers, inspired—appropriately, as you’ll see—by an essay published in the TLS. The literary scholar Daniel Karlin reports on a 12-month experiment, of which he was both amateur scientist and subject:

On January 1, 2024, I embarked on a project I had had in mind since my retirement four years earlier: to spend a year without reading a single book, newspaper, magazine, learned journal, academic treatise—indeed, anything printed on paper that did not “officially” require me to read it (such as a medical appointment or the notification of a speeding fine).

Karlin learned three things, the first of which is our theme, but the others are worth noting, also.

“My second discovery,” Karlin writes, “was about memory”:

I became aware of (or anxious about, to be honest) how little of the literature I’d read, particularly poetry, I could remember…

Me too! I sometimes wonder why I bother to read, since so little seems recoverable on demand; I cling to the hope that …