A surefire way to increase the number of books you read this coming year

is to read less online. Not just to be online less, but to read online less. Read less news (or no news), fewer blogs and newsletters and Substacks, altogether fewer websites and online essays and articles, and replace that time with reading books. I promise you that your book-reading will increase dramatically, even exponentially, in 2021.

Nor would you lose much. Whatever you are reading online, of whatever quality, it will always prove to be inferior in substance, style, or relevance to your life than what has already been published in a book. Have you read Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Rilke, Levertov, Hopkins, Herbert, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante? All of them, and all of what they wrote? If not, then what you're reading online is subpar by comparison. What about the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, Melville, Twain, Trollope, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, McMurtry, Robinson, et al? No? Get on it. It's better than whatever you're reading on the internet. Take that to the bank.

Very nearly everything you have ever read and will ever read online is instantly forgettable and will make not a bit of difference to your life. Even in those rare cases where that is not true, what you are reading remains forgettable by comparison to what you are able to find already published in a book. Go read that instead.

Note well: Though your life would surely be improved by dropping online reading entirely, I'm not making that (salutary) suggestion. I'm saying you ought to read less online. Do that, and not only will your intellect and wisdom and soul be improved. You willl read more books this year than last.

Such sage advice I offer free of charge, first to myself, then to you, dear reader. Close this tab—turn off your phone—and go read a book. Thank me in a year.