The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader

How good reading brings us closer to others, and how efforts to personalise all the settings on our lives make us lonelier – and more narcissistic – than ever.

In the mid-nineties, Jonathan Franzen gave away his television. This was a time when to be without a TV was to be without video in the home – no Netflix on your laptop, no YouTube on your phone, no live TV on an iPad. His TV set – a massive box from “an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture” – had already been relegated to the floor of his closet, from where it could only be watched while squatting on the floor and holding the antenna. This was still not enough to prevent him from squandering time watching TV instead of reading books. Today, this seems quaint; if he was distracted then by that huge box, wait until it is small enough to slip into a pocket and carry it everywhere, at all times.

This story of giving up the television is how Franzen begins an essay called “The Reader in Exile”, in which he worries about the encroachment of digital technology on the private space of reading.The experience of reading his essay today – from my vantage point in a d…