James Marriott on Reading

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

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Summary

Is long form reading a dying pastime? Journalist and cultural critic James Marriott joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to defend the increasingly quaint act of reading a book in our scrolling-obsessed, AI-summarized age. He urges juggling a paper book and a Kindle, recounts ditching his smartphone to rescue his attention, and shares tactics for finding the "right" beach novel and biography. He and Russ also debate the value of re-reading, spar over Dostoevsky, celebrate Elena Ferrante, and swap suggestions for poetry that "puts reality back in your bones." Throughout, they argue that the shallowness of social media makes the best case for diving into the dense, intellectually difficult, yet uniquely transformative power of books.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is June 19th, 2025, and my guest is writer and journalist James Marriott of the Times of London, where he's a columnist.
0:44.8	His substack is cultural capital.
0:47.4	And our topic for today is reading based on a wonderful piece from his substack called How to Read and Why, James.
0:54.6	Welcome to Econ Talk.
0:56.4	Thanks very much for having me.
0:58.4	Now, I'm a little older than you.
1:01.7	As I get older, I come to appreciate and realize how much I love books.
1:07.8	And your essay just reminded me one more time. You say you read one to two books per week,
1:15.6	a physical book and another on your Kindle. That's a lot of reading. How do you find that time?
1:21.1	And why a physical copy and a Kindle, those are two separate books, right? Those are not a
1:26.2	Kindle copy of the paper book. Sometimes they're two separate books, right? Those are not a Kindle copy of the paper book.
1:29.8	Sometimes they're two separate books, although I've recently gotten to the bad habit of buying
1:32.9	the same book twice in physical form and Kindle, which is, yeah, I'm not proud of it, but it has
1:38.7	happened. Usually, the Kindle book I'm using to get through something a bit more long and difficult, I read before I go to sleep.
1:47.5	And I always think it's a bit of a life hack that if you read a Kindle every night before you go to sleep, the lights are out, my girlfriend's gone to sleep.
1:53.9	I've got a good half hour to read something a bit more, potentially a little bit more boring, which will ideally both send me to sleep and also by the end of the week,
	...

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