Photo-illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Andres Hernandez

A little less than a year ago, I talked to 18 people, writers, critics, editors, and Substackers among them, about how, exactly, they carved out time for reading in their day-to-day lives. Since then, picking up a book certainly hasn’t gotten any less challenging, nor the distractions fewer or less insistent, and yet, final sales tallies from 2025 are hopeful, showing an increase in book sales in the U.S., including in adult fiction and nonfiction. This year, I polled a broader range of readers — editors and publishing-industry people, yes, but also actors, a playwright, and the mayor  — on how, exactly, they make the time. 

I am always complaining about not having enough time to read, and yet I do nothing else. I have no idea when it gets done or by whom it gets done, but it's happening all the time. It's on the edges of life that it happens. 

When I was younger, I had a rigid system. For every new book I read for work, I had to go back and reread a book that I admired and was still trying to figure out. I can’t do that anymore. 

I am very monogamous: I like to start a book and finish a book, preferably in the same sitting. I read quickly. It’s very appetite driven; I’m nibbling here and there and then get sucked up into one particular book. When I was small, reading was a way to access what felt taboo or forbidden or like adult life. At this stage, the pleasure is more in looking at how each book is a kind of problem and is trying to solve something with its shape and its structure. 

Reading is one of the great activities of the nighttime for me. I love those unbroken hours where I can finish novels specifically. My work hours during the pandemic, when we were looking after kids, were from eight at night to four in the morning. Now I tend to read at night in bed. 

I spent the first half of my life trying to conceal my reading from my parents and now the second half trying to conceal it from my children. Right now, I’m supposed to be at the bank, but I’m standing outside the bank trying to reread this glorious novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Nobody gives me any peace, and I can’t read it at home, so I have invented this bank errand. I understand that books and reading are meant to be virtuous. But nothing that feels as good can be entirely virtuous, right? So when I say how much I read, it’s not with pride. I should be doing all these other things and I resolutely don’t because I generally read a book a day, whether old or new. I’m not proud of this. Who’s raising my children while I’m doing this? Where are they? I feel like Emma Bovary, leaving my children to their own devices and running off with a novel. 

I’m a very regimented person, especially since I’ve gotten sober. I read seven or eight books a month, almost 100 percent of the time. I’ve read all of those trashy memoirs, and I love them, but I limit that for myself at this point. Now I read to become a better writer. While writing a novel the past three years, I read 80 percent novels. 

I’m a Kindle woman. I don’t have any books in my house except my own and the galleys people send me. All the bookshelves that I used to have crammed with books are completely empty. Very strange, but that’s just who I am right now. It helps me focus as a writer. The good thing about Kindle is that it definitely has an addictive quality to it — I know that because I take it everywhere. It’s so lightweight. You don’t need natural light. You can have it for days without charging it. I work full time as a writer. Sometimes I work Saturdays with words and screens. Even though the Kindle is another screen, I can make the font so big. 

I read the most when I travel. Day to day, I don’t interact with words on a page after 7:30 p.m. because reading is work for me. I am sedentary writing all day so it’s hard for me to read after I’ve been writing. My window for reading is 6 p.m. to 7:30, when I’m exhausted from exercise and it actually feels good to be sitting down. 

You have to make a conscious effort. I force myself to do this. Obviously everything else is more fun at this point, dopamine and TikTok and all of that. I had to force myself to start reading more a couple years ago, and it’s very good for me. I keep the percentage in the bottom corner of my Kindle and that pushes me. I’m like, I’m gonna read till 20 percent even if I’m not in the mood. You can get hooked on that. I used to take my hand out of the dryer for gel nails at the salon and I’d be tapping it, but that fucks up your nails. But you can knock your elbow on it and it still changes. I’ve discovered all the tricks.

If I see a Rolls-Royce in the world, I’ll tailgate or I won’t let them in because it’s such an ostentatious display of wealth; I feel like talking publicly about your own reading habits is a slightly less gauche version but still in the category of the person having the Rolls-Royce. To have a life that allows me to read in this way is such a function of the fact that I’ve been lucky and have time and enough money that I’m not panicking constantly. 

I try to wake up and walk to this coffee shop near my house and read before I look at my phone, which I leave at home. I do that because I have no self-discipline and it’s easier to have one moment of self-discipline than endless moments of self-discipline. I like being around strangers. It’s comforting and diverting in a way that doesn’t make it impossible to read, but when you want to break from the fictional characters or the world, it’s nice to be able to look up and see a separate circus going on around you. 

Right now I’m obsessed with Yiyun Li. I’ve never read anyone like her. I get scared to summarize her books because I don’t want to blaspheme her precision. She’s been through such unbelievable agony and has communicated it with such clarity. I find the act of doing that to be so hopeful and affirmative, even though so much of what she talks about is grotesque in its pain. I looked up the other day to see if she teaches any adult-ed classes at Princeton because I was like, I wonder if I could go and take one. I have Beatlemania for Yiyun Li, which is insane.

At home, I read wherever the maximum number of people will see me so that I can have a smug sense of superiority. I read in my bed before falling asleep sometimes. I read when I feel frightened or disconnected from myself. The most consistent thing is a desire to feel like I exist in my own life, which is a little bit of a paradoxical way of going about it, to enter into a fictional world where you don’t exist at all. 

Day to day, it's less novels and more articles and studies that I'm reading. The main obstacle is time with everywhere I need to be in a day and all that has to get done. I miss reading, though; it gives us a chance to escape into another world — and every New Yorker deserves that. That’s why, as mayor, I want to be sure every child has the opportunity to become a confident reader and get lost in a good book. 

I don’t track my reading. It’s not as much as I’d like, but I’m hopeful I’ll finally finish The Gods of New York sometime next week.

Most of my reading happens in the bathtub in the evening, for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. It creates a space of serenity where I can focus. I have stacks of books by my bathtub and multiple pairs of glasses. I don’t worry if I drop the book in. Every now and then a glass of wine will make its way into the room, or a candle — anything to set the mood. I have a little shelf by my bathtub with all of my reading paraphernalia. I also read in bed before I go to sleep, but I can’t get as many pages in because I fall asleep; the nice thing about the bathtub is hopefully you stay awake. 

I love a hard copy because I like to write in the book and page forward and back. I also like to know physically where I am in the book. I still think books are the greatest technology ever invented. 

I’m often immersed in a story I’m writing, so any book I read is going to naturally be in conversation with these characters I have in my brain all the time. If I feel a book’s voice is somehow interfering with the thing that I’m trying to write, I have to put it down. Sometimes, I’ll read a book through the filter of what I’m writing and notice all these strange parallels and synchronicities. For Liberation, there was a book called The Movement, which has interviews with women of the second wave. 

A friend once said, “Reading fixes your life,” and that is what I always think about. It gives you that air around whatever is happening in your own life and that window into something else that I find essential for feeling good. 

I read partly to show off but mostly to delay doing real work, which is either operating restaurants or writing a follow-up to my first book. Because I only sleep four hours, I tend to read in the dead of night, but my favorite place to read is on very long train journeys. Although I read, on average, a book a week, I only enjoy about one book in six. The other five make me either jealous or furious. 

Until I was 40, I mostly read paperbacks. Nowadays, I read mostly hardcovers. If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll listen to an audiobook. While reading, I’m constantly scribbling illegible notes in the margins, and as a result, the book’s usually in such crappy shape when finished that I have to buy another clean copy. I’d rather be tortured than have someone read my notes. I’ve an ever increasing stack of reads to read, but during the time it takes me to finish a book — I read one book at a time, currently Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman — I’ve added three more to my list. I think more about the books I haven’t read than the ones I have read. 

I read whenever and wherever I can — at bedtime, on an airplane, snatching a piece here and there and trying to cram it in as much as possible. I love all kinds of books, biographies especially, but also fiction and other forms of nonfiction. 

At my age, it’s gotten more difficult to read for several reasons. I have an eye condition that makes reading challenging these days, and I vastly prefer reading in print than digitally, so that slows me down. In addition, I’ve been very busy with audiobook narration, which limits my reading by necessity to the books I’m recording — spending time studying them, making notes, rehearsing. That said, books are still a hugely important part of my life and a delight. I don’t track my reading; it depends on the given week, day, or time of year. These days, I consider any reading a win. The stack next to my bed — which includes The Correspondent, by Virigina Evans, and My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakoff — is monumental! 

Nearly every day, I read physical books. I prefer hardcover books. They are enduring, giving me the opportunity to pass them on. 

I often read in an easy chair and ottoman with a freestanding reading lamp positioned beside me for ease of adjustment. For the last few years, I have been traveling and working without stopping, so I carry two to three books with me depending on the length of my time away. I just read Nothing in This Book Is True, But It’s Exactly How Things Are, by Bob Frissell, and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, while in India. Often I read while flying on airplanes. When the cabin gets quiet after takeoff, I soar deeply into my book of choice and the outside world drifts away. I also read in bed before sleeping. I sometimes do fall asleep, then travel deeper into dreams of the writer's story, extended in my dream state memories of the words. When I am shooting a film and under the deadline and complexity of creating a character, depending how intense, I read four to five days a week. I read ten to 18 books a year, some slower than others as I tend to go back to read passages over to best understand their meaning. 

I tend to read right before I go to bed. It’s the best time for my focus, and it relaxes my brain. The only issue is that, when a plot is too good, I struggle to put it down and sleep. I’m currently finishing Didion & Babitz and try to read a chapter each night. I also get a lot of reading done on airplanes — and in my profession, I’m always flying — because it helps me keep myself busy when it isn’t wise to sleep. I wish I were better at listening to audiobooks but my focus only really remains if I’m reading the words in front of my face. 

The main obstacle is my schedule — when I’m onstage in particular, I’m awful at taking in new information. There’s a three-hour musical taking up so much of my brain that the idea of trying to expand it any further makes me feel like I’ll explode. That said, I tend to read two books at a time. One is usually informational, and one is a fictional read for fun. One of the craziest combinations I’ve ever read was Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

I attempt to read 50 to 75 books a year. It’s always a wild feat, but when I’m working on films, I read avidly in between setups. On Octet alone, I read about seven books just in the recording booth while we were laying down vocals for the soundtrack. 

I read either on the couch in my living room, especially on the weekends when no one is around, or sitting up in bed. I turn my phone over and put the screen face down and silence it. I will even go as far as to text my daughter and my assistant that I’m going offline for a couple of hours. If I know I want to really create a nice environment for myself, I will bring a glass pot of tea on a tray with some biscuits. That way, I have enough for two or three cups of tea and I can sip it slowly without going back to the kitchen. I wear something soft and comfortable — drawstring pants or pajamas. 

I’m a big believer in books on tape, even before Audible. When I lived in Los Angeles, there was a place on La Brea called Talking Book World where you could check out an audio copy of a book in disc form. It was nice to be able to listen to books while stuck in traffic. Sometimes now I’ll lie on the couch and listen to a book and close my eyes if I’ve been writing a lot and my eyes hurt. I also like to listen to books when I’m doing weight training. I listened to Giovanni’s Room when I was working out during the Houston season of Top Chef. But mostly I love pulpy things, like The Memoirs of Cleopatra. With that book, I enjoyed alternating between reading the hard copy and then listening to it. And there are some books I’ll only read, like Francine Prose’s Five Weeks in the Country. 

I’m a very slow reader. There are times when I will read two, three books a month. Then I go a couple of months without reading anything. I read probably eight to ten hours a week when I’m not on vacation or not on a plane. I relish air travel for that. 

My favorite reading spot is by the reservoir in Central Park on a particular bench near a Japanese cherry tree. I’ve been frequenting it for seven years and get disappointed when someone is sitting on it. It’s usually shaded. For whatever reason, it has less mosquitoes than other benches.

Besides on my bench, I like to read early in the morning before my kids wake up, when the house is the quietest, from 5:30 to 6:40, under a blanket in my living room. I can read almost anywhere though. I put brown noise in my earphones, and I can read on the public bus, in the back of a cab, in a coffee shop, waiting at pickup or drop-off. If I’m on vacation, I read a book a day. 

Reading is a huge part of my job — understanding a character, deep diving into the soul of another person. Developing from IP is also a big part of what we do at my production company, Composition 8. As an actress, I have to develop the character from just dialogue. But when I read a book, I like that the world is so rich and lived in and I get to spend 250 pages with a singular voice. 

I do not understand digital reading. It doesn’t sink into my brain in the same way. I usually have a pen because I really like to make notes. There’s something about touching the paper that feels like an intimate experience. A pen makes a great bookmark. I often will read a book around the subject matter of a character I’m developing or something that is reminiscent of it but not the same thing. I find it helpful to steal and cannibalize things from books, either images or experiences, and add them to my sense-memory bank. 

Every night before I go to bed, I do ten minutes of looking at real estate and then I read a book until I get sleepy, which is about half an hour. I never listen to novels but I will often listen to memoirs on a walk or on the subway. 

I have this fantasy about having a country home where I have a full library. I already know exactly how it would look: a slate-green wall with sage-green shelving, just like my sister has. But that’s not the reality. The reality is I have a bedside table. There’s always like six books there, but I usually read one at a time from the beginning to the end. There are very few books I DNF. I read in my bed with my head on the pillow lying fully down. I do that even when I’m on location. My retainer is in so I feel like I’m being seatbelted. My husband and I often do it together, and the dog is in between us and the cat is full of disdain in another room. It feels very hygge. 

When I drive, I love an audiobook. If I’m on a road trip, Nora Ephron will be coming out, honey. Or Isaac Oliver or David Sedaris. There’s something about a comedic essay on a road trip that really makes the drive feel doable. Barbara Streisand’s book sucked me in so much that I finished it in two days — it takes two days just to listen to it, so it was probably more than two days. But I listened to it on 1.5x speed because she reads slowly. I’m now reading this novel from a few years ago, The Recent East, by Thomas Grattan, which just caught me. Once a book does that, I’m very binge-y. 

I don’t track my reading at all. In so much of my life, I’m trying to accomplish goals. I want the reading to be nice for me. Do I read a book every week? No, not at all. Probably four a month, two audiobooks and two regular books a month. For so long, it was difficult to find the next book. Because I hosted the National Book Awards this year, they gave me every book that was nominated, so I’m working my way through them. 

I discovered that it is necessary to set time aside to read, so I always make time on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. It’s a treat to myself that I look forward to. I try to read most week nights, too. I also always have a book with me — on the train, at the pharmacy. 

I think I chose my apartment because it has a really good reading spot. My sofa has a view out the window of New York Harbor. My gigantic wolfhound mix, Arthur, sits with me. I don’t have other hobbies. I’m not going to the gym on the weekends and I don’t go to brunch. 

When you’re reading in the mode of an agent or an editor, you’re reading in some ways to discover problems. But it’s important not to only read in that mode because that’s not the way that someone who buys a book reads.

Like anyone, I’m distracted by the internet. I spend far too much time looking at shoes and apartments that I’ll never own. I either read print books or I have a Kobo, which doesn’t have internet access. It’s important to not be online when I’m reading. I try to resist the urge to Google things, because if I do, the next thing I know I’m looking at shoes. 

I like an audiobook for a road trip. My boyfriend and I will pick out a book together. We listened to Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake on a drive to Maine. It became this magical thing because at every stop, we would talk about Creation Lake. 

I read easily 70 books a year. I’m a big not-finish-er. I’m okay with reading around a book, especially if it’s nonfiction — reading an intro and two or three chapters that interest me. I think that’s a valid way to read. 

I read every day. I try to end my day by reading in bed after I’ve done my crossword puzzle and the Spelling Bee. I also read throughout the day as needed, and I always need to be reading for one thing or another, whether submissions for The Rumpus or research for my own work or, when I’m very lucky, reading for pleasure. I love to read horizontally, but not in bed because then I’m just going to want to sleep. We have a large ottoman in the front of our sitting room. I read there or on our couch. 

I was a very early adopter of the Kindle. I actually buy the physical copy of every book I’m reading on my Kindle, but I read primarily e-books because I travel a lot. I get a lot of galleys via PDF. I read on planes and in cars when I’m taking a car service somewhere. I sadly cannot read while I’m driving. I wish I did audiobooks, but I don’t like being read to. 

I probably read about a hundred books a year plus a lot of magazine articles. I have an imprint, so I read countless book submissions. Though with those, I read until I don’t want to read anymore, so that could be three chapters or 30 pages or two pages. I keep a Google doc of everything I’m reading. I get asked for book recommendations a lot, and I’m not the kind of person who can just do a quick recall. 

Oddly enough, I can watch TV while reading. But when I’m really engrossed in a book, I put the TV on mute because I actually don’t want to be pulled out of it. I’m not very ritualistic when it comes to reading, but I used to be. When I was a kid, I had this beautiful canopy bed and I would curl up in my own little sanctuary. But now I just read whenever I can.

I read whenever I can, wherever I can, mostly based on the deadlines that I have for the people that I’m interviewing. I generally read on a device but I usually have a hard copy of a book as well so that I can highlight what I need to use for my interviews. 

If I’m traveling, I’ll read on an airplane. If I’m home, I’ll read on the sofa or at my desk in my office. Sometimes at the School of Visual Arts, where I teach. I don’t need quiet, especially if the book is particularly engrossing. I’ll forget my surroundings. I’m also a finisher. I’ll stay up way too late to finish a book because I’m so engrossed in it that I want to reach the redemption phase of closing the book. 

I look forward to flights because it’s my best reading time. If I have a few books I’m looking forward to reading, I always think, When is my next flight? I’ve looked into buying an airline chair on Ebay just to have the perfect reading chair at home. 

I don’t think there is any moral virtue to reading books. I personally like it because I like to daydream and it’s much easier to do that with a book than it is with a film or an audiobook. But some of the smartest and most interesting people I know are insecure about never reading books, and I’ve met plenty of idiots who are always reading them. I think it’s just one pleasure among many that acquired a lot of extra valor in our minds because of the way we were educated — quizzed on books in school, congratulated every time we finished a book, things like that. Sometimes I read on an iPad, and after a page it says, “Congratulations! You have reached your daily reading goal.” What reading goal? How do you know if this book is any more valuable to me than a heartfelt text from someone, or anything else I might be doing here? I don’t think it deserves any congratulations if you read books or any shame if you don’t. 

I buy a lot of books I don’t read right away, just because I want them around. I like having a version of that feeling of browsing a bookstore at home, when I can afford it, in case there’s ever a rainy day or a cancelled meeting and some random book happens to catch my eye. It’s cheaper than buying art and way more interesting to have lots of cool books around. Sometimes I even end up picking one up years later and actually reading it. That’s a great feeling. Occasionally a visitor comes to my place and sees all the books and says skeptically, “Did you really read all these?” No, of course not — it’s a bookshelf, not a trophy case.

I’m a Sabbath observer, so I’m completely offline Friday night to Saturday night. I notice within two hours of sundown I’m thinking more clearly and can really immerse myself in my current book. I generally finish one book over the weekend and start another. During the week, my routine is a few pages at night before bed when I’m very tired. 

Beyond the one book throughout the week, I read stories, essays, and now some poetry because I’m hosting about 18 writers a month between my two reading series and I want a taste of each author. Franklin Park is mostly fiction; Crown Inn is mostly emerging writers and poets. I try to read about 50 pages of each book of the authors’. If I haven’t completed one of those — I finish about one of three — it goes on my TBR pile and I pick them up again throughout the year.

I have a little table and desk set up in my kitchen, and it has the best lighting. I take books with me on the subway, but I have missed stops, so it’s kind of a problem. 

It’s hard to quantify how much I read. I’m completing under 40 books a year, but I may have read dozens of books halfway through — and not because they’re bad, but because I’m on to the next thing. Right now, I’m reading Julie Bunton's Famous Men, which is very immersive and great on the sentence level.

I read at night, on the weekend, early in the morning — whenever I can grab a spare hour or two. I could read hanging like a bat from the attic rafters if I needed to. Because I watch a sufficient amount of television and movies, and because the goddamn phone inevitably takes up more minutes and hours in the day than I’m willing to admit, you have to aggressively carve out that time to read and stick to it. One thing I have to do is put the phone in another room. Which probably means if I lived in a studio apartment, I’d read exactly nothing. That’s how invasive it is. There’s nothing like a good ten-hour flight. While I’m on it, I try to pretend that I have no internet. Reading The Radetzky March or Midnight’s Children or Maimonides’s God: A Guide for the Perplexed is not something you can do in ten-minute bursts. It takes quiet and it takes a decision to do it. Concentration is precious. You know how some people say, “I don't know what I did before I had children?” I don’t know what I did before the phone. 

When I first started this job some time ago, one of my kids said to me, “Dad, you don’t read anything with a cover anymore.” What he meant was that suddenly I was reading manuscripts all the time. I read them late at night and would wake up with them all over me, like a kind of paper bed spread. That was a warning shot across the bow. So I’ve always got a couple things going. I read lots of manuscripts and advanced books on the screen, but I prefer the tactile quality of a book, the feel of it, the smell of it. Right now I’m reading Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March in an Everyman edition, and it’s just beautiful. 

You come to a point in life and you realize you're not gonna get to everything. There's so much that I want to read and know and feel and experience on the page that I don't want to squander any time. I have an addiction to certain kinds of books that I could die of not having read. I read lots of biographies, autobiographies of pop musicians and athletes. But I’m not going to spend endless time on spy novels anymore. I can get my fix of that by watching season two of The Agency. Unless somebody comes along and tells me that there’s something as good as John Le Carre, I don’t need to spend time on it. But I still haven't finished Daniel Deronda. 

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