Booklist

What to do when you’re not on your phone? Read a book! Strengthen your attention muscles.

Reading books on paper is one of the very best ways to build an off-ramp from the speeding highway of digital media. Here’s a short list of books that are enjoyable to read and profoundly motivating to keep yourself headed towards more of what you love.

Focus & Attention

  • Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (2022)

    This is a beautifully written, deeply feeling critique of our modern life. Hari takes us inside his personal experiments with smartphone detoxing while also investigating and questioning if this is even a personal issue.

  • Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (2019)

    If you need to immediately change your relationship with your phone, start here. Expertly studied, easy to read or listen to as an audiobook, the recommendations are utterly convincing and mostly easy to implement. You can start small, it’s worth it.

  • Deep Work by Cal Newport (2016)

    Once you have a little bit of space from your phone, and you’re beginning to dream of all the things you can do, read this! It’s a classic for a reason.

Technology & Communication

  • The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (2024)

    This book is extremely important, and pretty difficult to read not because of the writing style (it’s wonderful) but because it’s hard to stomach just how bad things are for kids now. Also, if you’re a parent, it might go strangely missing for weeks as it did in our house. You may want to put a fake book jacket on it.

  • Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1985)

    Neil Postman’s critique of television was written in the 1980’s and has predicted many of the issues we face today in our internet and image-soaked digital landscape. The writing style is a little old-fashioned but it’s absolutely worth the effort.

Rest & Imagining the Future

This part may seem random, but it’s not. While we’re getting off our phones and strengthening our attention muscles, we also need to rest and restore. Give yourself time to imagine and daydream about what your life and the world would look like if smartphones went away.

Reading Science Fiction is an incredible tool for stimulating our inner lives and imaginations. There are so many wonderful writers, but if fantasy and sci-fi is new to you, we recommend starting with Ursula Le Guin. None of these tales are too stressful or too slow to read before bed. Your subconscious and dreams will thank you.