This blog has been set up to host a Lockdown Reading Project, looking at how living under lockdown restrictions for prolonged periods of time has affected people’s reading habits, their ability to concentrate and their motivation. You will find blog posts describing different participants’ individual experiences of reading during a pandemic, plus some book recommendations. If you would like to participate in the project, please contact us here.

Lockdown lethargy – is it a thing? For me, certainly, I’m sorry to say. At the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020 I thought I would use the enforced seclusion at home to plough my way through substantial 19th century novelists: Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, Wilkie Collins and many, many more. I have read and loved novels by all of those authors, and thought I would fill in the gaps. To my surprise, I couldn’t bring myself even to pick up a single one of them, let alone embark on reading them. It was disconcerting – what had happened to my concentration? I turned to shorter, less demanding works, but couldn’t finish them. An unfinished book haunts me with a sense of failure, but I couldn’t muster the energy to persevere.

After several conversations with people who, it turned out, were experiencing the same dispiriting lack of motivation, I decided it would be interesting to see how widespread this malaise was. Was lockdown exerting some mysterious negative influence, draining us of energy? Or did hardier souls than me find the wherewithal to knuckle down and read all those tomes they had been meaning to read for years?

Hence the Lockdown Reading Project. Here you will find how other people have experienced reading under lockdown, and gain some book recommendations along the way. I hope you enjoy reading people’s musings on their reading, or failure to read, in these strange, unsettling times.