It has by now become platitudinous to remark that people hardly read books any more – and physical ones even less – absorbed as we are by the demands of the digital age: scrolling, clicking, obsessively checking likes, and converting emotions into sequences of little yellow faces.
As a child, I read books constantly – along with everything else: the magazine that arrived with the Austin American-Statesman every Sunday to my parents’ house in Texas, appliance warranty papers, the text on the cereal box at breakfast. Decades later as I travelled the world in my twenties and thirties, resurrecting the ravenous reading habit was always on my to-do list – and yet it was inevitably easier to just continue scrolling and clicking.
Prior to spending the month of February 2022 in Cuba, I had not read a book for leisure in nearly a year – and I had not even finished that one. Then, one afternoon in Havana, I was overcome with spontaneous determination and dispatched myself in search of a used bookstore. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.