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I truly appreciate Tracy Durnell’s “Letting things build”, a reflection on a year and a half of more focused reading leading to her digital aura series posted to her website. I also wonder if some of the friction people are noticing in long-form reading comes from choosing the “wrong” books to start rebuilding their focus. Optimization culture makes us want to read “the best” book on any subject (or the longest novel if Goodreads is any indication), even if we might not be ready for it yet. We know better than to expect ourselves to be able to run a marathon without training, but it’s easy to forget that our minds are embodied too: our thinking both softens with disuse and can be honed with practice. This passage finds me thinking more about reading with purpose. I am not making as much time to read for pleasure as I used to, and am currently juggling a handful of books rather than one or two titles. In some ways I might need to re-train my own mind.