I’m not talking about what we read online. Nor about those books, often award-winning, that feel shaped more by an industry than by someone with a real calling to write and something meaningful to say. I’m thinking of the kind of books that weren’t written to please or to sell easily, yet have enriched minds, touched something deeper, and, in their own quiet way, changed the world.
I’ll admit this from the start: for a few years now, I’ve been reading less. I do listen to more books, but it never quite feels like a substitute. The experience is simply different. I like to read with a pencil in hand, to underline, to draw, to write in the margins, to return to certain passages. To repeat lines to myself. To pause and think. To fall asleep with a book nearby and pick it up again in the quiet of the morning.
But in Bucharest, I rarely have the time, the right frame of mind, or the quiet to stay with a book in this way.
And I’ll admit something else: the parent and the teacher in me are uneasy. I keep noticing that as children grow, they read less and less for pleasure. And the problem isn’t just that one habit is replaced by another. Deep reading matters. It reshapes the mind. It’s closely tied to focus, empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to tell truth from lies, to make sense of the world.
Following a narrative, turning descriptions into living images in the mind, stepping into the lives of characters, these were never rare experiences reserved for a few. They were part of how many people grew into themselves. They helped form minds that could stay attentive, be patient, reflect, question, and understand.
Deep reading has shaped free people, people difficult for tyrants and political illusionists to control. What kind of people will grow in its absence? Who will still have the patience to follow an argument through? To hold a real conversation? To respond thoughtfully, after truly understanding what they’ve heard? Who will still be able to tell truth from lies?
When we were children, we were told: what you carry in your mind cannot be taken from you. It was something passed down by generations who had lost much, but understood that the one thing no regime can steal is what the mind has gathered and shaped through years of meaningful reading.
I sometimes wonder, remembering times when people lost their homes and land, if everything else were taken from us today, what would truly remain? What would we still have to rely on?
A few days ago, I was talking with a student about how to be convincing, how to build a clear argument and support it with relevant examples. I asked him how he would persuade his parents of something. He said: “I’d find an article or a video online that would convince them.”
It made me think, as it often does, that some children are growing used to relying on what they find elsewhere, instead of what they can build in their own minds. A kind of ease that slowly replaces effort. A quiet loss of confidence in their own thinking. The illusion that all answers are already out there, waiting to be found.
Over time, this can become a form of weakness. Because, in the end, only what truly lives in your mind cannot be taken away.
But it’s not just children. Many adults are drifting away from reading as well. Books struggle to compete with entertainment, with the phones always within reach, with the pull of immediate satisfaction. The love of reading turns out to be fragile. And losing it, both individually and as a society, may come at a cost.
So what can we do?
Perhaps, before anything else, we can begin to recreate the conditions that make reading possible again. Education plays a role, of course. But so does something simpler: having uninterrupted time, and protecting a slower rhythm in a world that constantly demands urgency and competes for our attention.
Reading needs quiet. It needs space. Continuity. A place where you’re not constantly pulled away.
We can create small refuges for reading, places where the mind can stay with an idea for as long as it needs. Places where books no longer have to compete with the noise of everything else.
Is it worth the effort to keep creating such spaces, in our homes, in libraries, in nature? I believe it is. Reading doesn’t necessarily make us better people. But it can make us more attentive. Less quick to judge. More able to understand who we are and where we’re going. More open to others, and to the world.
Beyond my concerns in Bucharest, there is also hope.
At AlmaCalma, books are always in motion. Sometimes we bring them back and forth between Bucharest and Alma. Other times, guests of all ages bring their own books, and you’ll see them carried from room to room, read in hammocks or out on the hills, each person with and within their own story.
When I’m at Alma, it doesn’t feel like people have stopped loving books. It feels more like they simply need time and the right kind of space.
And it’s a quiet joy to see that, here, they find both.
Perhaps this is yet another reason to protect, together, the stillness and the gentle rhythm of this village.
